Organizational Culture Change

Organizational culture represents the collective values, beliefs and principles of organizational members and is a product of such factors as history, product, market, technology, strategy, type of employees, management style, and national culture; culture includes the organization’s vision, values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions, beliefs, and habits (wikipedia.com).

For instance, the way you dress and act at a party differs from the way you dress and act at the church. These guidelines form the organizational culture of the party and church respectively.

According to study.com, organizational culture is a system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs, which governs how people behave in organizations. The organizational culture in an organization has strong influence on the people in that organization as it dictates how they dress and behave. They are a set of guidelines that set the behavior of people in a particular organization.

Organizational culture refers to culture in any type of organization including that of schools, universities, not-for-profit groups, government agencies, or business entities. In business, terms such as corporate culture and company culture are often used to refer to a similar concept. The term corporate culture became widely known in the business world in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Corporate culture was already used by managers, sociologists, and organizational theorists by the beginning of the 80s. The related idea of organizational climate emerged in the 1960s and 70s, and the terms are now somewhat overlapping.

Since organizational culture is seen as something that characterizes an organization, it can be manipulated and altered depending on leadership and members. Culture as root metaphor sees the organization as its culture, created through communication and symbols, or competing metaphors. Culture is basic, with personal experience producing a variety of perspectives.

Organizational culture is made up of seven characteristics, they include:

• Team work: this characteristic of organizational culture is extremely important in some companies. They place a lot of emphasis on group projects so as to foster good relationships and easy collaboration among their employees.
• Emphasis on outcome: Some of us work in companies where results are over emphasized. They do not place so much emphasis on the processes but on the outcomes. Those companies take achievement as a major part of their organizational culture.
• Innovation: there are companies that focus on creating new, more efficient ways in achieving results. Those companies place a very high value on innovation. They do not encourage stereotypes but bold and risk involved methods of getting tasks done.
• Attention to detail: precision is the order of the day at some companies. Those companies like things being done as accurately as possible.
• Emphasis on people: for some organization’s the emphasis is placed on the people. This means that they respect their employees and would do everything within their power to treat them with great dignity.
• Aggressiveness: there are companies that place great emphasis on beating the competition at all cost.
• Stability: there are also companies that place great emphasis on upholding a stable and bureaucratic environment.