The Informant

Topic – Organization Culture
Movie Title - The Informant

Movie Summary - This movie deals with the greed within Corporations. This is a true story of Mark Whitacre played by Matt Damon who works for a lysine developing company who after working for many years is now the vice president in the company. He learns about the price fixing going on in the company and decides to become a spy for the FBI. The U.S. government decides to go after the agri-business giant with a price-fixing accusation, based on the evidence submitted by Mark. But as his incessant lies keep piling up, his world begins to crash around him.

Concepts - Organizational culture is a set of shared assumptions within an organization that guide interpretation and action by defining what is an appropriate behavior for various situations. A strong culture is said to exist in an organization when people in the organization are aligned with the organizational values and a weak culture is said to exist when the employees are not aligned with organization culture or values. Having a strong culture can sometimes be detrimental to the company if the employees are doing the wrong thing and they think it is right as per the company organization culture. Strong culture sometimes leads to 'Groupthink' where employees begin to think in a similar way for the sake of unanimity and do not look at alternative solutions. Apple, Mary Kay are some of the companies with strong organization cultures. In this movie clip 'The Informant', the organization culture prevalent in that particular agro company was greed and the employees would strive to do anything to make money for the company and themselves and hence lead to price fixing.