Impact of Existent Culture on the Performance of Mobile Telecommunication Companies in Nigeria

Ajayi Christiana Olalounpe Department of Business Administration, Joseph Ayo Babalola University, P.M. B. 5006, Ilesa, Osun State, NIGERIA ABSTRACT The study identified the culture that existed in mobile telecommunication companies in Nigeria. The population for the study comprised all employees of eight telecommunication companies in Southwestern Nigeria namely Mtn, Globacom, Etisalat, Airtel, Visafone, Odua Network, Starcomms and Multilinks. The study used of twostage sampling technique. At the first stage, purposive sampling technique was used to select three companies namely Mtn, Glo, and Etisalat because of their wider network coverage. Also, purposive sampling technique was used to select Lagos, Oyo and Osun States in Southwestern Nigeria where major offices of these selected companies were located. At the second stage, convenience sampling was used to select 90 employees from Mtn, 80 employees from Globacom and 30 employees from Etisalat and this was stratified into three categories (senior, middle and junior). Primary data and Secondary data were used in the study. The responses to the questionnaires were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), which generated the frequency distribution, means, Standard deviation and Durbin Watson statistics among other responses. The hypothesis of this research was tested at 0.05 level of significance using Durbin Watson Statistics hinged on factors influencing the culture of mobile telecommunication companies. The study found out that teamwork spirit, effective communication, creative synergy, viable business strategy; among others will help in improving performance of mobile telecommunication companies. The study also found out that there are some factors which could influence the existence culture of mobile telecommunication companies in Nigeria. These include National culture; Government policies; Industry norms; Macroeconomics; and their Legal system. This study however recommended that managers should endeavour to strengthen the existent culture in their companies and employees should ensure conformity with its usage.


Introduction
Culture is an indispensable factor to be considered in corporate building, because it is a pattern of mutual assumptions, standards and idea governing the way employees within an organization think about or act on problems and opportunities. In this context, culture is to be reckoned with because it robs on the orientation of decision makers as well as the citizen of any nation. Culture also dictates the performance of business both in private and public sector. The mobile telecommunication sector is not an exemption in this perspective.
Significant understanding of organizational culture will help corporate organizations to know how it influences their activities and work out means of improving them. Special interests have been placed on the organizational culture virtually in all organizations because of its relevance. Employees are depending on the existing culture to behave rightly and accordingly. The organizational culture that is well defined will aid concentration, reduce confusion, strengthen the skills, instincts, abilities, processes and resources that organizations and employees need to survive, adapt in the fast changing world.
Although, organizational culture cannot be seen but they exist to the point that each employee is aware of its existence and the newly recruits must be familiar with it. Cultures of an organization need to be considered as the component of organizational characters which is having effect on employee performance. Organizations pay attention to their culture which they uphold in order to do better than their competitors. In other words, organizational culture will help in doing excellently or performing better than the competitors and also strive to sustain the competitive advantage which in turn helps them to contribute to the national development. Hence, continuous existence of the organization and realization of its goals require taking strong culture as their priority.
It should be noted that the efficacy of organizational culture will determine how the employees will agree on a particular pattern of behaviour.
Organizational culture enables employers to overcome potential hindrances to their competitive advantages sustainability, create alternative cause action to issues and ultimately preserve the organization all over the time. The success of any organization depends largely on the organizational culture and what really differentiate successful companies from others are their culture (Cameron and Quinn1999).

Research Questions
i.
What are the existent cultures in mobile telecommunication companies in Nigeria? ii.
What are the factors that influence the existent culture of the mobile telecommunication companies?

Objectives of the study
The general objectives of the study are to examine if existing culture in mobile telecommunication companies in Nigeria has influence on its business performance.
-To identify the existing culture in mobile telecommunication companies in Nigeria.
-To assess the factors that influences the culture of the mobile telecommunication companies in Nigeria.

Research Hypothesis
Ho: Organizational Cultures do not have any significant influence on performance of mobile telecommunication companies in Nigeria.
H1: Organizational Cultures have significant influence on performance of mobile telecommunication companies in Nigeria.

2.0
Conceptual Review

Concept of Organizational Culture
An organizational culture virtually depends on the segment of the business, the past history and the employees' behaviour and perception and nature of communication pattern. Buchanan and Huczynski (2004) defined organizational culture as the collection of relatively uniform and enduring values, beliefs, customs, traditions and practices that are shared by an organization's members learned by new recruits, transmitted from one generation of employee to the next.
The purpose of organizational culture is to control the way employees interrelate at their workplace. A healthy culture encourages the employees to stay motivated and sincere towards the Management. The culture of a workplace mostly spur the workers into action that will lead them to better performance predefined policies which guide the employees and give them a sense of direction at the workplace. It is very important that every business organization should have sets of guideline for the employees to work accordingly; each person is cleared about his or her roles and duties in the organization and how to accomplish the responsibilities given before the stipulated time.

Existing Culture in Mobile Telecommunication Companies
 Customer-oriented culture: All employees are trained to serve customers better and to enable any employee to help customers when needed. Employees are empowered to resolve customer problems in a way the way that will make the customers to re-visit the organization or feel satisfied for the service delivery.  Competitiveness culture: In global world, there is keen competition among the telecommunication companies and they compete for various market and available resources, just to meet up with their set goals and objectives. An organization with a competitive culture will look for all available opportunities to surpass others in the industry.  Teamwork: This is a situation in an organization whereby there is a collaborative effort of a team to achieve a common goal or to complete a task in the most effective way. This concept is a crucial part of a business, as it is often necessary for colleagues to work well together and try their best in ensuring successful accomplishment of task given.  Effectiveness and Efficiency: This entails ability of the workers in an organization to do the right things the way they are supposed to. It also entails doing those right things in the best way.  Trust and Openness: If an organization that imbibes trust and openness as its culture, its employees tend to have their tasks accomplished before deadline. In other words, the more the level of trust we can have in our colleagues, the more we will be able to accomplish. Cultivating trust involves everybody within the organization.  Creative Synergy: This is a situation whereby organizations use collective creativity to achieve results that the sum of their individual effort could not achieve. When teams achieve creative synergy they have potential to be more creative and innovative.  Effective communication: This increases productivity and job satisfaction; it decreases rate of absenteeism and employee turnover.  Innovation and Risk taking: There cannot be any serious innovation if an organizational culture does not support risk taking. Risk taking is an essential ingredient that promotes innovation that is the practical implementation of creative ideas. Employee risk taking represent a willingness to withstand uncertainties and mistakes, as one explores new ideas and tackling new challenges without obvious solutions, in order to improve the likelihood of goal attainment.  Viable Business Strategy: Strategy is a way by which businesses ensure a sustainable competitive advantage by investing the resources needed to develop capabilities leading to the long-term excellent performance. The dynamic business environment is being dealt with by different strategies developed by an organization.

Concept of Performance
Continuous performance is the target of any organization, because performance is germane to the growth and progress of an enterprise. Thus, the concept of organizational performance is one of the debatable variables in management research and it is widely used as an indicator of performance management.
Performance refers to the extent of accomplishment of the mission at place of work that builds up an employee job (Cascio, 2006). Different researchers have different thoughts about performance. Mostly researchers used the term performance to express the range of measurements of transactional efficiency and input and output efficiency (Stannack, 1996).
According to Richard Devinney, George and Johnson (2009), organizational performance encompasses three specific areas of firm outcomes: financial performance (profits, returns on assets, return on investment); product market performance (sales, market share); and shareholder return (total shareholder return, economic value added). Organizational performance does not only mean to define problem, but it also seek for solution to problem (Hefferman and Flood 2000). Daft (2000), says that organizational performance is the organization's capability to accomplish its goals effectively and efficiently using the available resources. As similar to Daft (2000), Richardo and Wade (2001) say that, achieving organizational goals and objectives is known as organizational performance. They suggest that organizations success shows high return on equity and this become possible due to establishment of good employees performance management system.
 Performance is a set of monetary and non-monetary indicators which offer information on the degree of achievement of objectives and results.  Performance may be illustrated by using an essential model that describes how current actual results can work contrary or in support of the set standard in the nearest future.  Performance is not fixed; therefore, it requires result and analysis of the result.  Performance could be understood another way depending on the person involved in the evaluation of the organizational performance.  To define the concept of performance, it is necessary to know its elements characteristic to each area of job.  To report or describe an organization's performance level, it is necessary to be able to evaluate the result.

Empirical Review
A substantial number of researches have taken place in order to prove the relationship between organizational culture and business performance. In this part of the study, few researches would be presented highlighting related previous studies to show the relationship between organizational culture and performance.
The study of Raduan, Naresh, Haslinda and Ying (2008), in their samples, they took American, Japanesse, European companies operating in Malaysia. They sent the questionnaire to 240 employees in those organizations and they received only 133 responses from the respondents which means that there was a 55% response. The respondents were only managers from the selected companies. Questionnaire was designed keeping Hofstede's (1980) cultural model in mind and questions were asked from four different dimensions -power distance, consistency, individualism and collectivism and sex of the employees. In order to measure organizational performance, five measurements were used namely financial performance, customer perspective, internal business perspective, innovation and theological appraisal. This study on corporate culture and organizational performance demonstrates that organizations that control their corporate culture in an effective way are most likely to experience higher productivity, technological advancement and better work life among employees.
Researchers of this study suggested that companies should control their culture in such a way that employees have clear idea about it, so that they can be self motivated and can devote themselves in accomplishing company's mission and objective. Expatriate managers are expected to learn the cultural values of Malaysia instead of bringing their culture within the company. This is a very much possible scenario even if the expatriates are well influenced by their own culture. However, the researchers state that, national culture does not act as a barrier for foreign companies in Malaysia, rather, foreign companies adapt with Malaysian corporate culture quite easily. They added that in an organization, managing the system and people of the company is the prime issue and it does not depend on the pure adoption of any country's culture. They opt that, management should know what business they are in and what their employees want from then and only then, they can come up with an effective corporate culture. The findings of this study are very much consistent with the findings of Cameron and Quinn (1999) and Kotter and Heskett (1992). Denison (1984) uses data from 34 American firms on cultural performance over a period of five years, scrutinized the characteristics of organizational culture, and tracked the performance over time in these firms. Reichers and Schneider (1990) state that culture researchers have committed various studies to the definitions of culture; relatively few researchers have been contributed in culture and performance research. The only reason for doing this was the complexity in operational concept of the culture construct. According to Kotter and Heskett (1992), they investigated the relationship between long-term organizational performance and economic performance across more than 200 organizations. Moreover, the study has arranged three vital contributions, being one of the important and most conscientious researches efforts on this subject. First, relationship between culture and performance established in their research is forceful. Second, the writer gives an important combination of theoretical point of view regarding the nature & scope of culture. Third, they sketch strong associations between culture, management practices and performance. The claim that organizational cultures are attached to performance and that it was initiated on the apparent role that culture could play in increasing competitive advantage.
undemanding than many studies involve. Most of writers and successful managers suggest that strong organization culture is very essential for business because of three important functions: First, organizational culture is in line with the social control that may cause to make influence on the employee's decisions and behavior. Second, organizational culture works as social glue to bind the employees together and make them feel a strong part of the corporate experience, which is useful to attract new staff and retain the best performers. Third, organizational culture is very useful to assist the sense making process and it helps the employees to understand the organizational events and objectives, which enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the employees.

Methodology
The design used for this study was descriptive. Descriptive research design is normally intended to describe and report the way things are. They are characterized by systematic collection of data from members of a given population through questionnaire and interview. Two stages sampling technique were used. At the first stage, purposive sampling technique was used to select three companies namely: Mtn, Glo, and Etisalat. At the second stage, convenience sampling was used to select 90 employees, 80 employees from Globacom and 30 employees from Etisalat making a total of 200 questionnaires were administered and this was stratified into three categories (senior, middle and junior). The responses to the questionnaires were analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), which generated the frequency distribution, means, standard deviation, and Durbin Watson statistics among other responses.

Data Analysis and Results
Objective 1: Identifying the existent cultures in mobile telecommunication industry

Source: Field Survey, 2016
Discussion of findings

Value and its components
As summarized in Table 1, on the existence of value culture in telecommunication industry, 84 respondents representing 52.5%, strongly agreed, 64 (40.0%) respondents agreed, while 7(4.4%) were neutral, 4(2.8%) disagreed and just 1 (0.6%) strongly disagreed. The respondents that selected strongly agreed and agreed were higher in number compared to other options. This means that value and its components are significant part of organization culture of telecommunication industry. This was supported by mean of 4.41 on the scale of 5.

Attitudes and its components
In the case of Attitudes components in Table 1, 72 respondents with 49.4% strongly agreed, 62 (38.8%) agreed while 10(6.3%) were neutral 7(4.4%) and 2(1.3%) were disagreed and strongly disagreed respectively. This is being supported by mean of 4.31 on the scale of 5. The organization that has attitude and its components as part of their culture will likely soar higher.

Beliefs and its components
Part of summary in Table 1, also shows the view of respondent in respect of belief in an organizational culture, 47 respondents strongly agreed with percentage of 29.4, 71 agreed with 44.4%, while 9 (9.6%) respondents were neutral and 23(14.4%) and 9(5.6%) respondents disagreed and strongly disagreed respectively. The significant of the belief and its components of communication, innovation and risk taking, improvement of product and services and viable business strategies were all confirmed by the mean of 4.19 on the scale of 5.

Behaviour and its components
As summarized in Table 1, the number of respondents that strongly agreed were 44(27.5%) and those that agreed were 79(49.4%), while 11(6.9%) did not decide; 21(13.1%) and 5(3.1%) disagreed and strongly disagreed respectively. The degree of responses revealed that the behaviour and its component pave way for improvement in performance of an organization.

Norms and it components
In the case of norms of telecommunication industry, 69(43.1%) respondents strongly agreed, 59(36.9%) respondents agreed while 16(10.0%) were neutral, 12(7.5%) and 3(1.9%) disagreed and strongly disagreed respectively. This means that the good numbers of respondents see norms and its component as significant to their organization and its mean value is 4.13 with standard deviation of 0.998.

Discussion of findings National Cultures and its Components
The influence of national culture and its components on the telecom companies' 68 respondents representing 34.0% agreed that it had influence, 32 respondents representing 16.0% strongly agreed that it had influence and 19 respondents representing 9.9% were neutral and 56 and 25 respondents representing 28.0% and 12.5% respectively disagreed with its influence. The high level of agreement supported by a mean value of 3.09 on a scale of 5.0 indicating that national cultures influenced organizational culture

Components of Government Economic Policies
With regards to the policy of a government in Nigeria on how it influenced the telecom companies, 91 respondents representing 45.5% agreed that it had influence, 38 respondents representing 19.0% strongly agreed that it had influence, 20 respondents representing 10.0% were undecided as to its influence while 38 and 13 respondents representing 19.0% and 6.5% respectively disagreed with its influence on organizational culture. This high level of agreement by the respondents was confirmed by a mean value of 3.49 indicating that economic policies influence organizational cultures in the telecom industry in Nigeria (see Table 2).

Industry Norms and its Components
In case of industrial norms of the telecom companies, 35 respondents representing 17.5% strongly agreed to its influence 99 respondents representing 49.5% strongly agreed that it had influence, while 19 respondents representing 9.5% were undecided, 40 and 7 respondents representing 20.0% and 3.5% respectively disagreed with its influence. These high levels of agreement were corroborated by a mean value of 3.60 on the scale of 5.0 indicating that norms in the industry influence organizational culture in the telecom companies.

Macroeconomic Factors
Regarding the macroeconomic factors such as exchange rate to influence organizational culture of a telecom company, 35 respondents representing 17.5% strongly agreed; 99 respondents representing 49.5% agreed with it, while 24 respondents representing 12.0% were neutral and 35 and 7 respondents representing 17.5% and 3.5% respectively disagreed and strongly disagreed. The position of the majority was confirmed by a high mean value of 3.54 on a scale of 5.0 point of rating which indicates that macroeconomic factors influence organizational culture of telecom companies

Legal System
In case of legal systems of a company, 51 respondents representing 25.5% strongly agreed with it; 88 respondents representing 44.0% agreed while 25 respondents representing 12.5% were neutral and 26 and 10 respondents representing 13.0% and 5.0% respectively disagreed and strongly disagreed with its influence on organizational culture. The high level of agreement was supported by a mean value of 3.74 on the scale of 5 showing that the cultures of telecommunication companies were affected by the legal systems of a country.

Test of hypothesis one
Null hypothesis one ( Where, y= dependent variable, that is Organizational culture (ORGCUL). This is measured by using changes in responses of agreed and disagreed respondents on identified culture in the telecommunication companies as proxy assuming the influence of undecided respondents to be insignificant.  Vol.11, No.5, 2019 103 Also, β0 = Intercept, that is, the organizational culture that is not as a results any factors while β1-β5 are the parameters to be estimated and ei= error term.
A priori expectation for the model is that, β1 to β5>0.

Interpretation
Tables 3 to 5 above present the results of the test statistics compute for the null hypothesis one. In table 3, the pvalue of the F-statistics computes for testing the overall significant of the null hypothesis one of 0.0000, is less than the critical value of 5%. This implies that the null hypothesis which states that there are no significant factors influencing organizational culture in telecommunication companies in Nigeria is rejected. In table 4.6, the p-value for testing the significant of national culture as one of the factors influencing organizational culture of 0.000 is less than the critical value of 5%. This implies that the null hypothesis which states that national culture has no influence on organizational culture is rejected. In fact, the p-values of government policies, industry norms, macroeconomic factors and legal system of 0.0000, 0.0000, 0.013 and 0.003 respectively are less than the critical value of 5%. This indicates that Government policies, industry norms, macro-economic factors and legal system influence organizational culture in mobile telecommunication companies in Nigeria. In fact, the regression coefficient obtains for national culture of 34.672 indicates an existence of a positive relationship between national culture and culture of the mobile telecommunication companies in Nigeria. This further reveals that no telecommunication companies in the country can go against the culture of the nation. For instance, if national culture requires compulsory registration of all active 'SIM' subscribed in Nigeria no telecommunication company can go against it. Therefore, national culture and culture of the telecommunication company in the country are directly related. It can be asserted that, there is a positive relationship between government policy, industry norms, macro economic factors, legal system and organizational culture. This assertion is based on the fact that the regression coefficients obtain for Government policies, industry norms, macro economics factors and legal system of 0.892, 1.290, 0.589 and 23.450 are all positive which is in line with the priori expectation for the model.
Also, in table 4, the coefficient of determination (R 2 ) obtains of 0.996 indicates the fact that 99.60% of organizational culture in Nigerian mobile telecommunication is due to national culture, government policy, industry norms, macro-economic factors and legal system. Therefore, national cultures, government policy, industry norms, macro-economic factors and legal system are good predictors' variables for organizational culture in Nigerian telecommunication companies. Furthermore, the Durbin-Watson coefficient obtains of 2.023134 reveals the existence of a minimal auto-correlation among the variables of the study; hence, the predictors' variables of the study have the ability to also influence the culture of the telecommunication industries in Nigeria in the long run.  Vol.11, No.5, 2019

Conclusion
This study concluded that organization culture in mobile telecommunication companies include: Customeroriented, Competitiveness, Teamwork, Creative Synergy, Stability, Effective Communication, Innovation and Risk taking and Viable Business Strategy.
The study also showed that the mobile telecommunication companies' cultures' are being influenced by Government economy policy, Industry norms, Macroeconomic factors and Legal system of a country. Factors that influence culture they should be given attention so as to prevent its negative effect on their performance.

Recommendations
Given the roles that the existent cultures played in performance of mobile telecommunication, companies' managers should endeavour to understand them by devising means of strengthening and applying them on their day to day activities.
The factors that influence the organizational culture should be reduced to the barest minimum level in order to thrive and perform as expected. Since organizational culture project the image of the organization there is need for the managers to reiterate them to their employees and punish any deviants appropriately.
Finally, management should endeavour to examine the effects that the organizational culture had on business performance. They should ensure that the employees' morale were high; they should also put in place a clear set of values that underpin business performance; seeks feedback from clients and customers with a view to improving services. Furthermore, they should ensure that there is a high rate of sales turnover because of those cultures.

Contribution to knowledge
The result of this study will contribute to knowledge about the factors that influences organizational culture which include national culture, government policies, industry norms, macro-economic factors and legal system. Having realized this basic influential factors, caution must be taken by the mobile telecommunication companies in Nigeria about choice and application of culture, so that their internal system will not thwart sustenance of national development.