Organizational Culture

Organizational culture and its characteristics

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Organizational culture and its characteristics

Organizational culture

Culture relates to the informal aspects of organisations rather than their official elements. They focus on the values, beliefs and norms of individuals in the organisation and how these individual perceptions coalesce into shared meanings. Culture is manifested by symbols and rituals rather than through the formal structure of the Organization.

Organizational culture is defined in different perspective by different theorists in past. Social scientists have explored the concept of organisational culture in organizational theory. Brown (1998) stated that the concept of culture has been derived from four sources of interest including climate research, national culture, and Human resource management and from conviction approaches. In 1970s a survey report was conducted regarding climate of organization; findings were concluded that organizational culture is the sophisticated approach to understand the beliefs and attitude of people for respective organization (Cameron et al, 1999, pp. N.D)

Another concept evolved to understand organizational culture is derived from national culture. The source of national culture is used by Deal and Kennedy (1982) which stated that organizational culture plays a central role in the success of organization and it should not be perceived as one of the factor such as strategy, structure or politics.

Interest in organizational culture from human resource management and performance point of view originates from the fact organizational culture is non-mechanistic, flexible and imaginative approach to understand the working approach adopted by the managers of the organization. This approach refers to providing the solution to all the problems irrespective of their magnitude.

Defining organizational culture

There are efforts made by theorist to define and explain the concept of organizational culture for its effective implementation in specific organization. In the presence of dynamic environment organization are bound to pay special attention on developing the culture best suited for the growth and development of organization as whole. The theoretical development of organizational culture is based on certain studies conducted within the field of organizational theories.(Bevan., 2011, pp. 4-9). The studies were based on certain classifications written ads follows

Kennedy describe four generic to explain the concept of organizational culture, macho culture, work hard/play hard culture, bet your company culture and process culture.

Handy explained organizational culture within four classifications power, role task and person.

Hostede explain the concept that culture differs in five dimensions, based on power distance, individualism and collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity/femininity and confusion dynamism. There are different definitions of culture helps in understanding the concept. Some of the definitions are as under. According to Martins, “organizational culture is a system of shared meanings believed by members, varying from organization to organization”.

Another definition of organizational culture given by Brown states, “organizational culture as the pattern of beliefs values and learned ways of coping with different experience that have developed with in certain time period of organization's history and tend to be implemented in material arrangements and behaviour of its members.

Conceptual models of organizational culture

There are different models to understand organizational ...