Organizational Culture

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Organizational culture Culture is something that encompasses all of us. It helps us to understand how things are created, acknowledged, developed and managed. In this context, culture helps to define and understand an organisation and how it works and manages. Organizational culture is a shared value system derived over time that guides members as they solve problems, adapts to the external environment, and manage relationship (Schein in Wooten and Crane 2003, Vol. 21(6), p.276). Organisational culture is about how things get done subtly without people watching so that the organisation runs smoothly. Organisational culture is needed so that company can run without hiccups and run efficiently. It shows organisation structural stability and patterning and integration (Schein 1997). Organisation culture also determines the type of leadership. There are different types of culture. Three types of culture are constructive or positive, passive or defensive culture and aggressive or defensive culture (Cooke and Lafferty in Sullivan, Decker, Jamerson, 2001). Constructive or positive culture involves self-actualization, humanism, affiliation, and achievement of the organisation staff, passive or defensive culture is where the focus is on staff approval, dependence, convention, and avoidance and aggressive/defensive where is on competition, perfectionist, power and opposition of staff (Cooke and Lafferty in Sullivan, Decker, Jamerson, 2001). There are three layers that comprises of an organisational culture. There are layer 1, Layer 2 and Layer 3 to an organisational culture. Layer 1involves shared underlying assumptions and core values of a group. These parts are stable and unchanging (Neuhauser, Bender and Stromberg 2000 p... ... middle of paper ... ...s (Schein 1997) also play a part in creating culture. Rules help authority to deal with their peers. Rules pave the way for the different levels of management to deal with each other. They cover the way how staff should treat each other, communicate with one another and treat our environment in the organisation. Developing rules in management helps to create culture in an organisation. Allocating rewards and punishment helps to create organisational culture. Rewards and punishment are allocated according to employee performance in the organisation. Allocation can also be done according to the number of years of employment, educational level of staff and performance of the department that the employee belong to rather than the employee’s individual performance. By allocating rewards and punishment according o various factors, culture is created in an organisation.

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