2. After reading this chapter, you should be able to:
1. Define organizational culture.
2. List organizational culture’s key characteristics.
3. Differentiate the dominant culture from subcultures.
4. Identify characteristics of a strong culture.
5. Explain how a culture is sustained over time.
6. Describe how employees learn an organization’s culture.
7. Explain how culture affects the success of mergers and acquisitions.
8. List conditions that favor the successful changing of a culture.
3. WHAT IS ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE?
organizational culture refers to a system of shared meaning. In
every organization there are patterns of beliefs, symbols, rituals,
myths, and practices that have evolved over time.
Organizational culture maybe different from the summation of its parts, the following
represent the key characteristics along which cultures differ.
1. Individual initiative.
2. Risk tolerance
3. Direction.
4. Integration.
5. Management support.
6. Control
7. Identity
8. Reward System
9. Communication pattern
4. • DO ORGANIZATIONS HAVE UNIFORM CULTURES?DO ORGANIZATIONS HAVE UNIFORM CULTURES?
Organizational culture represents a common perception held by the organization’s
members.
A dominant culture expresses the core values that are shared by a majority of the
organization’s members.
It is this macro view of culture that gives an organization its distinct personality.
Subcultures tend to develop in large organizations to reflect common problems,
situations, or experiences that members face. These subcultures can form vertically
or horizontally.
When one product division of a conglomerate has a culture unique from that of
other divisions of the organization, a vertical subculture exists. When a specific set
of functional specialists—such as accountants or purchasing Of course, any group
in an organization can develop a subculture.
5. CULTURE AND ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESSCULTURE AND ORGANIZATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS
A strong culture is characterized by the organization’s core values being
intensely held, clearly ordered, and widely shared. The more members that
accept the core values, agree on their order of importance, and are highly
committed to them, the stronger the culture is.
Effectiveness requires that an organizations culture, strategy environment,
and technology be aligned.15
The stronger an organizations culture, the more
important it is that the culture fi t properly with these variables
6. CULTURE: A SUBSTITUTE FORCULTURE: A SUBSTITUTE FOR
FORMALIZATION?FORMALIZATION?
A strong culture results behavioral consistency
It conveys to employees what behaviors they should engage
in. It tells employees things like the acceptability of
absenteeism
A strong culture may be more potent than any formal
structural controls because culture controls the mind and soul
as well as the body.
7. CREATING, SUSTAINING, AND TRANSMITTING CULTURECREATING, SUSTAINING, AND TRANSMITTING CULTURE
How a Culture Begins
The organization’s culture results from the interaction between
(1) the founders biases and assumptions and
(2) what the original members whom the founder initially employ learn
subsequently from their own experiences
Keeping a Culture Alive
Selection. The explicit goal of the selection process is to identify and hire individuals
who have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform the jobs within the
organization successfully
Top Management
The actions of top management also have a major impact on the organization’s
culture. Employees observe management’s behavior, “such as the time so-and-so
was reprimanded for doing a good job just because he was not asked to do it
beforehand or the time that so-and-so was fired because she publicly disagreed with
the company’s position.”
8. Socialization.
No matter how good a job the organization does in recruiting and selection,
new employees are not fully indoctrinated in the organization’s culture.
Socializations helps in the process of learning the organization culture,
values, beliefs and customs that are in place
How Employees Learn Culture
In addition to explicit orientation and training programs, culture is
transmitted to employees in a number of other forms—the most potent
being through
a) stories,
b) rituals,
c) material symbols, and
d) language.
