Organizational Development across Cultures

Organizational Development across Cultures

Introduction

The study of organizational culture is a relatively new phenomenon in the world, before 1980, few authors dealing with this topic. The first works about popularized terms like values, beliefs, basic assumptions, principles, and others who once were linked together as one concept that began to take root in the business. Culture has to do with the socialization process that occurs within a company, through a social objectification. There is a culture without inherent organization that identifies, distinguishes and guide their actions and ways of doing, ruling their perceptions and their public image with her. Cultural events are themselves categories of analysis, through which one can carry out the culture in a firm diagnosis.

Discussion

The birth of this new approach has become a fresh method of research in the field of communication in organizations. It has also become attempt to develop an interpretive framework for members to give meaning to organizational activities. Given the nullity of this matter, at a theoretical level there are two major trends among schools of thought on organizational culture:

That defines culture as an essential element in organizational life: an influential variable in corporate behavior, just as it could influence the weather, conflict or leadership (something you have).

Identifying it as the organizational essence (basic metaphor): shaping of meaning, with the possibility of offering a shared interpretation of reality that provides the ability to organize. The culture from this perspective, promotes a sense of order and logic that symbolically represents the organization (something that is).

In the shadow of this second perspective: symbolic-interpretive, incorporating the cultural approach, the organization is perceived as communicatively embodied symbolic construction, a process by which they conform, convey and develop meaning. The company would be a cultural, social construction constituted symbolically and maintained by the social interaction of its members. They understand the culture and essence of the organization.

On the contrary, from a systems perspective, some authors understand the organization as a system composed of subsystems in continuous interaction, and culture, as an internal variable over the organization, produced by it. However, there must be a divorce between the two schools of thought, as the cultural phenomenon is also a system of shared meanings which people, organizational structure, processes of decision making and control systems interact to produce standards of behavior. It involved the communication system, which mediates the exchange with members of similar behavior patterns, which symbolic logic shared by a sense of belonging refers to the organizational culture.

Development of organizational culture

The concept of corporate culture, typical of Anthropology, Philosophy and Sociology, has been applied in other areas of thought, especially those relating to social organizations, through studies on human behavior in these. When you go beating critically about classic trends are needed to have a theoretical framework? It also includes Conceptual theme and organizational culture theory that could explain the development and use of elements. These elements can be such as symbols, values ??and climate, among ...