McDonald’s organizational culture (business culture) supports the company’s industry positioning goals. As a leading global fast-food restaurant chain, the company uses its business culture to optimize its human resources.
The company’s culture defines the traditions, habits, and core values that influence workers’ behaviors. To ensure business efficiency in production and service, McDonald’s organizational culture encourages learning.
This organizational culture reinforces human resource capabilities that strengthen the competencies noted in the SWOT analysis of McDonald’s. Such a condition highlights the significance of the company culture as a success factor in international foodservice business.
McDonald’s organizational culture supports operational efficiency to maximize productivity, service quality, and advantages over competitors, like Burger King, Wendy’s, Subway, and Dunkin’, and coffeehouses that compete with McCafé, like Starbucks, Tim Hortons, and Costa Coffee.
The company culture accounts for the importance of service quality in addressing competition, which the Five Forces analysis of McDonald’s determines as a strong external force in the foodservice industry.
Features of McDonald’s Organizational Culture
McDonald’s organizational culture aligns with the nature of foodservice business. This organizational culture has the following characteristics, arranged according to McDonald’s prioritization:
- People centricity
- Individual learning
- Organizational learning
- Diversity and inclusion
Human resource development and efficiency are emphasized in McDonald’s business culture. The characteristics of this culture support business growth and success in the international fast-food restaurant market.
People Centricity
McDonald’s organizational culture prioritizes employees’ needs in their career development. This is understandable, considering that the fast-food restaurant chain is a service business at its core.
The company’s core values and standards for business conduct emphasize the importance of supporting people. To ensure support for people, the company’s workplace culture motivates employees to communicate with management to help improve processes and procedures.
Employee behaviors based on this corporate culture affect McDonald’s marketing mix (4P). These behaviors influence the company’s effectiveness in promoting its foods, beverages, and the service that workers provide in preparing and serving items listed on the menu.
Individual Learning
McDonald’s organizational culture highlights the importance of lifelong learning. The belief is that individual learning promotes productivity, quality, and work effectiveness that contributes to foodservice business success.
To facilitate individual learning, the company offers training and development opportunities through Hamburger University, internships, global mobility, and leadership development programs.
These efforts ensure that McDonald’s maintains a work culture that motivates employees to keep learning for their personal and career development and the long-term success of the fast-food restaurant chain.
The goals derived from McDonald’s mission statement and vision statement are achieved using workers’ knowledge, skills, and abilities enhanced through this characteristic of the company culture.
Organizational Learning
McDonald’s organizational culture supports organizational learning. The firm extends individual learning to the entire organization to develop organizational knowledge that pushes the foodservice business forward to new heights of performance.
McDonald’s applies this characteristic of its corporate culture through policies, programs, communication channels, and meetings that encourage employee feedback and knowledge sharing.
The communication channels and other characteristics of McDonald’s organizational structure (corporate structure) facilitate knowledge dissemination alongside this characteristic of the business culture.
Diversity and Inclusion
McDonald’s official human resource management policy states that diversity and inclusion are key factors in the firm’s organizational culture. Diversity and inclusion reinforce foodservice HR capabilities in addressing business needs.
McDonald’s recognizes the importance of diversity and inclusion in optimizing human resource capabilities to deal with an increasingly diverse market, especially when considering the multinational scale of the restaurant chain.
McDonald’s company culture encourages employees, suppliers, franchisees, and customers to support workplace diversity and inclusion and share knowledge to improve the business in this cultural aspect.
Advantages & Disadvantages of McDonald’s Culture
McDonald’s organizational culture has the advantage of enabling the company to improve quality of service through people centricity, individual learning, and organizational learning. These traits motivate human resources to achieve higher foodservice business performance.
However, excellence and high quality are considerations not specifically included as traits of this corporate culture. While McDonald’s work culture highlights support for people and their learning, there is no emphasis on excellence in individual performance.
Thus, a possible improvement to McDonald’s organizational culture is to emphasize excellence and high-quality output through additional HRM programs or policies as extensions of the current cultural emphasis on individual learning and organizational learning.
References
- Costa, M. D., & Opare, S. (2024). Impact of corporate culture on environmental performance. Journal of Business Ethics, 1-32.
- Jimoh, A. L. (2026). The impact of human capital development on organizational citizenship behavior and organizational culture. Industrial and Commercial Training, 1-13.
- McDonald’s Corporation – Form 10-K.
- McDonald’s Corporation – Safe & Respectful Workplaces.
- McDonald’s Corporation – Values in Action.
- O’Reilly, C., Cao, X., & Sull, D. (2024). Organizational culture archetypes and firm performance. Journal of Business Research, 182, 114780.
- Yang, K. (2024). Golden Arches across cultures: Understanding McDonald’s global and local consumer behavior. Advances in Economics, Management and Political Sciences, 68, 85-91.