ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Organizational Culture



Organizational Culture

Introduction

There is immense importance of understanding culture and its impact on an organization's ability to deliver Customer Service Excellence from the perspective of both the customer and the organization. The notion of culture has its roots primarily in the field of anthropology. Scholars studying indigenous peoples used largely qualitative methods to gain insight into tribal practices, mores, values, and artifacts of culture. The study of organizational culture emerged from the initial studies of organizational climate when the business field became interested in measuring and understanding the human side of organizations. In the 1980s, organizational culture became a common research interest and yielded multiple best-selling books. These early researchers commonly adopted the qualitative research methodologies, typically used by anthropologists, to gain insight into the culture of organizations. Organizational culture often serves as the reference for unwritten rules in organizations, rules that new members must learn and obey (or risk being ostracized), and that fully acculturated members do not violate.

Culture and International Organization Culture

Researchers from the 1950s described culture as a transmitted pattern of values, ideas, and other symbolic systems that shape behavior. Moving from a definition of popular culture to the specifics of organizational culture, Schein (2004, p. 17) provides one of the most frequently cited definitions of it as a pattern of shared basic assumptions that learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.

Schein's work highlights the key components most researchers agree on regarding organizational culture while Cooke and Szumal (1993) note that most definitions of culture share a common theme “organized around the behavioral expectations and the normative beliefs of individuals in an organization” (p. 1301). The Ethics Resource Center (2007, p. 9) gets right to the heart of applied culture by including in their definition the comment that ethical culture “sets norms for employee behavior and tells employees how things work in the organization.”

Reviewing the existing definitions of culture yields some insight into the prodigious strength a culture maintains over an organization's members. Some researchers hypothesize that members of an organization invest a fair amount of energy into making sense of their organization's culture. This level of investment makes sense as the organizations people belong to typically provide financial means or fulfill personal satisfaction needs. Thus, we can assume the level of investment in organizations is high; therefore, the potential power of the culture over our behavior to sustain these vital connections is also high.

The study of these definitions and the research that supports the multifaceted understanding of culture over the decades yields the following amalgamated definition of organizational culture: a singular and pervasive set of values and beliefs shared by the members of an organization. New members of the group receive socialization to acculturate them into the highly homeostatic values and ...