Essay On Organizational Culture

What is Culture?

Culture is the set of values, norms, guiding beliefs, and understanding that is shared by the members of an organisation and taught to the new members as the correct way to think, feel and behave. It represents the unwritten, feeling part of the organisation. It is a complex phenomenon ranging from underlying beliefs and assumptions to visible structures and practices.

It was not until the beginning of the 1980s that organizational scholars began paying serious attention to the concept of culture (for example, Ouchi, 1981; Pascale and Athos, 1981; Peters and Waterman, 1982; Deal and Kennedy, 1982). This is one of the few areas, in fact, where organizational scholars led practicing managers in identifying a crucial factors affecting organizational performance, as against practice leading research.

Organizational culture is an area in which conceptual work and scholarship have provided guidance for managers as they have searched for ways to improve their organizations’ effectiveness.

The reason organizational culture was ignored as an important factor in accounting for organizational performance is that it encompasses the taken-for-granted values, underlying assumptions, expectations, collective memories, and definitions present in an organization. It represents “how things are around here.” It reflects the prevailing ideology that people carry inside their heads. It conveys a sense of identity to employees, provides unwritten and often unspoken guidelines for how to get along in the organization, and it enhances the stability of the social system that they experience. Unfortunately, people are unaware of their culture until it is challenged, until they experience a new culture, or until it is made overt and expl...

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...nt attributes of the subunit cultures, and aggregate them. This combination can provide an approximation of the overall organizational culture.

How is Culture related to Effectiveness?

The father of modern management, Peter Drucker, concluded that “We are in one of those great historical periods that occur every 200 or 300 years when people don’t understand the world anymore, and the past is not sufficient to explain the future” (quoted in Childress

And Senn, 1995, p. 3) Unremitting, unpredictable, and sometimes alarming change makes it difficult for any organization or manager to stay current, to accurately predict the future, and to maintain constancy of direction. The failure rate of most planned organizational change initiatives is dramatic. What is most interesting about these failures, however, is the reported reasons for their lack of success. Several studi