Study Guide
Organizational Culture: * Observable Artifacts: the manifestations of an organization's culture that employees can easily see or talk about. * Supply the signals that employees interpret to gauge how they should act during the workday. Artifacts supply the primary means of transmitting an organization's culture to its workforce. There are six different types of artifacts: symbols, physical structures, language, stories, rituals, and ceremonies. * Espoused Values: beliefs, philosophies, and norms that a company explicitly states. * Can range from published documents, such as a company's vision or mission statement, to verbal statements made to employees by executives and managers. * Whole Foods outward representation of espoused values --------> * Basic Underlying Assumptions: the taken-for-granted beliefs and philosophies that are so ingrained that employees simply act on them rather than questioning the validity of their behavior * Example: Safety in engineering firm, "In an occupation such as engineering it would be inconceivable to deliberately design something that is unsafe; it is taken-for-granted assumption that things should be safe."
Sub-Culture: a culture created within a small subset of the organization's employees. * Customer Service Culture: a specific culture type focused on service quality * Mayo Clinic has become a world-renowned healthcare provider because of customer oriented culture * Safety Culture: a specific culture type focused on the safety of employees * A positive safety culture has been shown to reduce accidents, GE investigated into some service centers that were having a lot of injuries and underwent a process to energize safety culture through meetings that identified safety problems * Diversity Culture: a specific culture type focused on fostering or taking advantage of a diverse group of employees * Denny's race discrimination lawsuit
Culture