The culture within an organisation affects organisational performance in a myriad of ways, but the existing research was found by this paper to only examine organisational culture’s effect on profitability. This narrow view creates a gap between culture as a starting point for performance, and profitability as an ultimate endpoint. What about everything in between that culture has an effect on? Rather than examining organisational culture in terms of how it influences profitability, this study looks at how organisational culture influences an aspect organisational performance, specifically: its effect on brand image or on word-of-mouth referral. To do so, this paper unpacks a causal chain of influences in four chapters. The research here shows how that employees situated within the culture influences customers to promise to refer the organisation to their social connections. The literature shows that organisational culture is a context that influences most facets of business, and this context is used as a filter by employees to understand how they should behave and what they should value. This paper proposes that employees receive internal brand communications within the context of the culture. Then, they conduct their service actions according to what is expected of them within this context. Customers who interact with these employees are then coming into contact with the organisational by the proxy of customer-facing employees. These interactions between customers and employees are what causes the customer to enjoy the service experience or not. The theory shows that when a service experience is enjoyed, there is likelihood of positive word-of-mouth referral. This paper correlates that and proposes that when there is a strong degree of alignment in organisational culture, employees receive internal brand communications and conduct their service actions in strong alignment of what is expected of them. This leads to customers perceiving the organisation in a way that is favourable and causes a significant number of customers to promise to recommend the organisation.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:netd.ac.za/oai:union.ndltd.org:uct/oai:localhost:11427/31506 |
| Date | 06 March 2020 |
| Creators | Farmer-Brent, Garret |
| Contributors | Irwin, Ronald |
| Publisher | Faculty of Humanities, Centre for Film and Media Studies |
| Source Sets | South African National ETD Portal |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Master Thesis, Masters, Master of Arts |
| Format | application/pdf |
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