IBM's Corporate Culture

Corporate Culture
Corporate Culture
Corporate culture defines how members of an organization behave towards each other. An organization’s culture depends on the values, beliefs, and behaviors observed within the organization (Deiss, 2020). The purpose of this paper is to explore IBM’s corporate culture. Over the years, there have been changes in the organization, including changes in diversity and learning as revealed by McIlwain (2020), which have influenced its corporate culture. IBM’s corporate culture was a mix of good and bad. On the one hand, the corporate culture promoted diversity and provided learning opportunities for its employees. On the other hand, it stifled employees’ ability to question authority and promoted unhealthy competition among employees.
IBM’s culture promoted diversity within and outside the organization. There were over 5700 women and 3,000 minority employees in IBM by 1979 (McIlwain, 2020). Women and members of minority groups often face discrimination in the workplace and are not given priority. However, according to McIlwain (2020), IBM not only gave them employment opportunities but also gave managerial positions to over 2,000 women and 2,200 minorities. Outside the organization, the company offered students in predominantly black higher learning institutions scholarships and provided grants to such institutions (McIlwain, 2020). By doing so, IBM was giving minorities a chance to get an education so that they could compete fairly with their white counterparts. One might argue that IBM was not as diverse because it appeared in the US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) report as one of the companies that did not give black people managerial or white-collar jobs (McIlwain, 2020). However, IBM’s report to the commission revealed that as of 1966, out of the 7,600 employees in white-collar positions, 590 were from minority groups. Even though this report did not indicate how many were black or Puerto Rican, it still showed that IBM gave opportunities to members of the minority groups (McIlwain, 2020). In addition, the company was still trying to include more minority employees and had developed a strategy to help it employ more black people (McIlwain, 2020). As such, even though it had not reached the ideal diversity promotion level, it was headed in the right direction.
In addition, IBM provided learning opportunities for its employees, both future and existing. For instance, it provided universities with its Model 650 machines on the condition that such universities would start offering computing courses (Campbell-Kelly et al., 2014). By doing so, IBM ensured that their future employees, who were students at the time,...