Corporate Culture: The Three Levels Of Organizational Culture

Culture is one of the most complicated words in the English language (Williams, 1983). The word organization culture was introduced by Pettigrew (1979) however the term was widely spread due to the work of Deal and Kennedy (1982). It was at the beginning of the 1980s after the publication of the Business Week article on corporate cultures when various scholars began paying attention to the concept of organization culture and since then thousands of definitions came to life. The term is used to describe the pattern of values, norms, attitudes, shared believes and assumptions that may have not been articulated but that shape the way employees behave and how things get done in an organization. (Armstrong, 2014).

The idea of culture as shared beliefs or values was shared by most scholars who also agreed that when those norms, values and shared beliefs become constant over time; they become the organization ‘personality’ or what is known as ‘Corporate Culture’. (Cr´emer (1993), Schien Burns and Stalker 1961, Baker 1980, Schwartz and Davis 1981, Peter and Waterman 1982, Schein 1985, Kotter and Heskett 1992, Lazear 1995).

The most cited perspective on corporate culture utilized to date is that of Schein (1985) who argues that culture has three levels, the first which is the most visible is the pattern of

They are not consistent with the main culture (Hofstede, 1998) and may be aligned to the main culture or opposed to it (Brown, 1995) and usually subculture may be stronger than the main culture which may influence perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours of employees to a greater extent than the main culture (Harris and Ogbonna,