Organizational Culture...!!!

Organizational Culture

Hey Readers

Today we will talk something about organizational culture.

While not always easy to capture or define, culture is an observable, powerful force in any organization. Made up of its members’ shared values, beliefs, symbols, and behaviors, culture guides individual decisions and actions at the unconscious level. As a result, it can have a potent effect on a company’s well being and success.

Acc. to Wikipedia, Organizational culture is the behavior of humans who are part of an organization and the meanings that the people reach to their actions. Culture includes the organization values, visions, norms, working language, systems, symbols, beliefs, and habits. It is also the pattern of such collective behaviors and assumptions that are taught to new organizational members as a way of perceiving, and even thinking and feeling. Organizational culture affects the way people and groups interact with each other, with clients, and with stakeholders.

Ravasi and Schultz (2006) state that organizational culture is a set of shared mental assumptions that guide interpretation and action in organizations by defining appropriate behavior for various situations. At the same time although a company may have their "own unique culture", in larger organizations, there is a diverse and sometimes conflicting cultures that co-exist due to different characteristics of the management team. The organizational culture may also have negative and positive aspects.

Schein (2009), Deal & Kennedy (2000), Kottler (1992) and many others state that organizations often have very differing cultures as well as subcultures.

According to Needle (2004), organizational culture represents the collective values, beliefs and principles of organizational members and is a product of such factors as history, product, market, technology, and strategy, type of employees, management style, and national cultures and so on. Corporate culture on the other hand refers to those cultures deliberately created by management to achieve specific strategic ends.

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,

(3) How power and information flow through its hierarchy, and

(4) How committed employees are towards collective objectives.

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.

That is all for today… Stay happy and Good Night… OPEN UP…!!!

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