Organization and Culture



Organization and Culture

Introduction

Originally culture refers to fundamental values, beliefs and norms that make up a society. Culture helps to differentiate one society from other society by its custom and image of its members. Culture allows members of its society to understand the situation and find solutions to apply on common problems. Similarly, culture in an organization plays a vital role to differentiate itself from other organizations. Organization itself is just an element of the society. Employees enter into the organization from surrounding brings their own culture with them. So, in order to eliminate the conflict between different culture, organization adopt an organizational culture to work smoothly. It is important for an organization to adopt a culture that congregates with the society where it is operating.

Discussion

Culture

Kennedy and Deal (1982) state that the failure and success of an organization is accounted by the solitary most significant factor, culture. The identification of culture is defined by four dimensions:

Values: Values are the beliefs of the company that lies in the bottom of the heart.

Heroes: Heroes are considered to be those individuals who represent values.

Rituals and rites: Rites and rituals are the customs of interface that possess strong symbolic behaviors.

Culture network: The culture network is the informal or casual interaction system within the organization.

In the mid of 1970s, it became important for the organizations to respond to changing surrounding and get adapted with the culture to resolve their business crisis. Morgan (1977) explains Japanese approach, the focus of the firms to bring change must be as a whole, the development of harmonious relations must be present at all levels, and the firms need to focus on merging organization's goals with the common goals of individual and dependency on the responsibility of employees (Mishra & Rabkundaliva, 2010).

If the organization is planning to bring change within itself, the change must be brought in real form, instead of cosmetic or short term change, and the real change can be occurred at cultural level. The company has to be aware about its existing culture and what changes have to be brought in existing culture. It is important for the organization to have strong leadership at top management level, because they are the key personnel to build strong culture and define the ability of the organization to be culturally innovative. Leaders are responsible to set vision and shape culture in the organization to raise social reality. Culture allows the leaders to find solution and to choose between different complex alternatives in bureaucracy where formal methods are required for business veracity.

Organizational Culture - Findings

Organizational culture can be defined as the set of beliefs, values and norms which identify the organization's way to carry out its business. In the research finding, Hofstede (1980) proposed four criteria to describe features of cultures and its behavior in different organizations (Khastar et al., 2011).

Individualism versus collectivism: It is the relation between an individual with fellow employees. The dimension of individualism is related to the degree to which a person feels ...