Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Organization Culture: The values and behaviors that contribute to the unique social and
psychological environment of an organization. Organizational culture includes an organization's expectations, experiences, philosophy, and values that hold it together, and is expressed in its self-image, inner workings, interactions with the outside world, and future expectations. It is based on shared attitudes, beliefs, customs, and written and unwritten rules that have been developed over time and are considered valid. Also called corporate culture, it's shown in:
(1) The ways the organization conducts its business, treats its employees, customers, and the wider community.
(2) The extent to which freedom is allowed in decision making, developing new ideas, and personal expression.
It affects the organization's productivity and performance, and provides guidelines on customer care and service, product quality and safety, attendance and punctuality, and concern for the environment. It also extends to production-methods, marketing and advertising practices, and to new product creation. Organizational culture is unique for every organization and one of the hardest things to change.
Dominant culture expresses the core values that are shared by a majority of the organizations members. Subcultures tend to develop in large organizations to reflect common problems, situations, or experiences. Core Values or dominant (primary) values are accepted throughout the organization. Page: 1
Strong versus Weak Culture: Strong culture is one that is internally consistent, is widely
shared, and makes it clear what it expects and how it wishes people to behave or in other words, that 'a positive organizational culture reinforces the core beliefs and behaviors that a leader desires while weakening the values and actions the leader rejects. Peters and Waterman (1982) indicates that 'a negative culture becomes toxic, poisoning the life of the organization and hindering any future potential for growth. Obviously, there is an inevitable bridge joining organizational culture and the level of success it enjoys. Strong culture is said to exist where staff respond to stimulus because of their alignment to organizational values. Conversely, there is Weak Culture where there is little alignment with organizational values and control must be exercised through extensive procedures and bureaucracy.' Kilmann, Saxton, and Serpa, (1986) defined strong cultures as 'those where organization members place pressure on other members to adhere to norms.' Byrne, (2002) indicates that 'a strong organizational culture will exert more influence on employees than a weak one. If the culture is strong and supports high ethical standards, it should have a very powerful and positive influence on employee behaviour.' Although all organizations have cultures, some appear to have stronger, more deeply rooted cultures than others. Initially, a strong culture was conceptualized as a coherent set of beliefs, values, assumptions, and practices embraced by most members of the organization. The emphasis was on (1) the degree of consistency of beliefs, values, assumptions, and practice across organizational members; and (2) the pervasiveness (number) of consistent beliefs, values, assumptions, and practices. Many early proponents of organizational culture tended to assume that a strong, pervasive culture was beneficial to all organizations because it fostered motivation, commitment, identity, solidarity, and sameness, which, in turn, facilitated internal integration and coordination. Still others noted potential dysfunctions of a strong culture, to the point of suggesting that a strong culture may not always be desirable. For example, a strong culture and the internalized controls associated with it could result in individuals placing unconstrained demands on themselves, as well as acting as a barrier to adaptation and change. A strong culture could also be a means of manipulation and co-optation (Perrow 1979). It could further contribute to a displacement of goals or sub goal formation, meaning that behavioral norms and ways of doing things become so important that they begin to overshadow the original purpose of the organization (Merton 1957; March and Simon 1958).
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Cultures Functions :
A pattern of shared basic assumptions within an organization. Learned as a way of solving basic problems of external adaptation and internal integration. Has worked well enough to be considered valid. Therefore, is taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.
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Primary Mechanisms:
What leaders pay attention to, measure, and control on a regular basis. How leaders react to critical incidents and crises. Observed criteria by which leaders allocate scarce resources. Deliberate role modeling, coaching, teaching. Observed criteria to allocate rewards and status. Observed criteria by which leaders recruit, promote, retire, and excommunicate organizational members.
Secondary Mechanisms:
Organization design and structure. Organizational systems and procedures. Organizational rites and rituals. Design of physical space. Stories, legends, and myths about people and events. Formal statements of organizational philosophy, values, and creed.
Spirituality and organizational culture The field of spirituality in the workplace expanded
rapidly during the 1990s, and that a bibliography distributed at a session on spirituality in the organization at the 1998 Academy of Management conference listed no fewer than 72 books on the subject, 54 of them published in the five years since 1992. Numerous journal articles have appeared on the subject, as well as special issues of journals devoted solely to the conceptsee, for example, the special issues of the Journal of Managerial Psychology (1994); Chinmaya Management Review (1999); the Journal of Organization and Change Management (1994 and 1999); and American Behavioral Scientist (2000). A special issue of the Journal of Management Education (2000) has advocated the teaching of the subject to management students. There are also two journals devoted to the topic: Spirit at Work and Business Spirit.' My literature search has thrown up doctoral theses (Beazley, 1997; Perez, 1999; Trott, 1996) and a Master's-level dissertation (Gibbons, 1999).2 And, in 1999, the American Academy of Management Annual Meeting set up the Management, Spirituality and Religion Interest Group, an indication of (American) academics' interest in the topic. For reasons of space, let us accept that the description provided above is an adequate survey of spirituality. In which case, what is organizational spirituality? Konz and Ryan (1999: 201) state that '[n]o agreed-on definition of spirituality in business exists' and cite Kahnwiler and Otte (1997) and McGee (1998) in support of this statement. 'Organizational spirituality', if not viewed as a direct synonym for 'workplace spirituality', is problematic. If one accepts the reification of an organization into an entity with its own reality, rather than considering that an organization is a collection of people engaged in purposeful activity, then it is a short step from endowing the reified organization with attributes. Organizational spirituality subsequently shares the same grammatical meaning as aspects such as 'organizational culture', which concerns the culture of the organization, and 'organizational strategy', which concerns the strategy of the organization. However, whereas culture is an activity (the way we do things around here) and strategy is a process (the way we decide or plan things around here), spirituality is a far more abstract quality, and sits Page: 8
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