Students are requested to Measure the Culture of a Firm in the Financial Services Industry from the Perspective of a Stakeholder: Economics and Finance Assignment, UOL, UK

Assignment Brief

How can culture be measured best?

Students are requested to measure the culture of a firm in the financial services industry from the perspective of a stakeholder. In particular, each student will select one stakeholder, e.g. the national regulator, an international governmental organization, shareholders, bondholders, the board, the the executive management team, employees, and clients.

Students should explicitly choose their perspective(s) and elaborate on why the measurement of culture is important and how it can best (although possibly not perfectly) be performed. The assignment should then develop an early-stage concept for such measurement. This concept should include a definition of key performance indicators (KPIs) and a process proposal for aggregating these into one overall culture measure(s). It is also expected that the early-stage concept is communicated with at least one visual tool (e.g. figure).

The word limit is 2,000 words (excluding figures, tables and footnotes). An academic writing approach to this essay including author-date citations is expected. Below is a suggestion of how to structure the essay.

Introduction
To provide a context for your assignment you should provide an introduction to culture and why it is important.

Main Body

It might be worth dividing the main body into 3 parts.

Part A

In this section, you can discuss the perspective of culture that will be the focus of the essay. It is advisable to provide the rationale for focusing on this perspective and include a discussion of how this has been measured in the past.

Part B

You should develop a new measure of culture. The focus should be on providing information about the methodology/data and the rationale that underpins this new measure. It is important to key/novel features of this methodology.

Part C

You should implement the measure and discuss the associated result(s). Does the measure yield plausible results? The visual aid, e.g. graph, should help the reader to grasp the essence of the results.