Organizational Culture: How Things Are Done
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
There exist successful corporations with very different corporate culture. Their employees enjoy their jobs and generally like the way how things are done at their company. Every organization has a set of values that characterize how people behave and how the organization carries out everyday business. Positive cultural norms strengthen the company while negative cultural norms have the power to take the company down.
A related concept concerning the influence of norms and values on how people work together and how they treat another is called Social Capital. It refers to the quality of interactions among people and whether they share a common perspective. In organizations with a high degree of social capital, relationships are based on trust, mutual understandings, and shared norms and values that enable people (inside and outside the organization) to cooperate and coordinate their activities to achieve organizational goals. It can be seen as goodwill where relationships are based on trust and people cooperate to achieve mutual benefits.
WHAT IS CULTURE?
Given its pervasiveness, we need to understand culture better. Culture is the set of values, norms, guiding beliefs and understandings that is shared by members of an organization and is taught to new members. Organizational culture operates on two levels:
1) Visible artifacts and observable behavior: the way people act and dress, the type of control structures, ceremonies shared by employees, stories, slogans, behavior, physical settings. The visible artifacts can be used to interpret culture.
2) Values in the minds of organization members: The underlying values, assumptions and thought processes of an organization operate unconsciously to define the true culture.
EMERGENCE AND PURPOSE OF CULTURE
Culture provides members with a sense of organizational identity and generates in them a commitment to beliefs and values that are greater than themselves. Culture generally
There exist successful corporations with very different corporate culture. Their employees enjoy their jobs and generally like the way how things are done at their company. Every organization has a set of values that characterize how people behave and how the organization carries out everyday business. Positive cultural norms strengthen the company while negative cultural norms have the power to take the company down.
A related concept concerning the influence of norms and values on how people work together and how they treat another is called Social Capital. It refers to the quality of interactions among people and whether they share a common perspective. In organizations with a high degree of social capital, relationships are based on trust, mutual understandings, and shared norms and values that enable people (inside and outside the organization) to cooperate and coordinate their activities to achieve organizational goals. It can be seen as goodwill where relationships are based on trust and people cooperate to achieve mutual benefits.
WHAT IS CULTURE?
Given its pervasiveness, we need to understand culture better. Culture is the set of values, norms, guiding beliefs and understandings that is shared by members of an organization and is taught to new members. Organizational culture operates on two levels:
1) Visible artifacts and observable behavior: the way people act and dress, the type of control structures, ceremonies shared by employees, stories, slogans, behavior, physical settings. The visible artifacts can be used to interpret culture.
2) Values in the minds of organization members: The underlying values, assumptions and thought processes of an organization operate unconsciously to define the true culture.
EMERGENCE AND PURPOSE OF CULTURE
Culture provides members with a sense of organizational identity and generates in them a commitment to beliefs and values that are greater than themselves. Culture generally