Organisation Culture

All Organisations posses a distinct form of culture with some having more than a single culture. This culture is usually very difficult to measure, change and most especially change.

Organisational culture refers to the behaviours of people at work, their shared beliefs and values.  Schein (1992, p.12) describes this as a set pattern of assumptions that a team shares as they learn working together over a period of time. Organisations

‘People’ form a very integral part of any organisation in today’s world and for an organisation to operate effectively its employees needs to understand its culture and business and be able to adopt its ‘culture’ for smooth operation. For example, many organisations, especially in the consumer goods segment and advisory (M&A advisory, wealth management etc.) are very customer / client oriented which means that they are expected to provide the highest standards of services to their clients and always put their clients benefits ahead of the organisation or its employees, this can be called its organisational culture. For example, the organisation I currently work with, UBS, has extremely strict compliance requirements which if breached lead to very serious actions against employees. The company also

This type of culture demanded that jobs be filled by experts in specific fields (eg) Sales reps on the hardware side of the business were being filled by qualified builders who could not only sell across the product range but who knew hardware building products and its functions expertly. The same went for the plumbing side of the business where plumbing sales reps were qualified plumbers. My position of Brand Manager demanded someone with a Marketing or Branding background. Those who worked in these specialised roles were, however, governed and controlled by strict rules and procedures co-ordinated by senior management within the branch. The culture at branch level is very indicative of the Role Culture pointed out by Handy/Harrison (1993) in their model of Characterising Culture. Pettinger mentions that the key relationship in Role Culture is based on authority and the superior – subordinate style of relationships. (Pettinger R: Introduction to Management, 4th edition 2007, page 354)

Coined as “the way we do things around here” (Deal and Kennedy, 1983, p. 501), culture encompasses how an organisation is run, its “personality”, and the norms, values, beliefs and attitudes (Armstrong, 2010) that reflect the organisation’s mission, aims and goals.

There are many definitions of organisational culture available in the literature, many of which are based on the fact that culture consists of values, beliefs, and assumptions shared by the majority of members of an organisation. These characteristics and shared views are then translated into common and repeated patterns of behaviour. Although it is difficult to come up with a single definition that would cover

Within the field of management, the success and failure of the modern business organisation has been largely depicted by the intricate concept of culture. Organisational culture, a concept borrowed from borrowed mostly from anthropology typically is defined as a complex set of values, beliefs, assumptions and symbols that define the way in which an organisation conducts and manages its business (Barney 1986). Management is not just an act of change, but the responsibility for and control of a company or similar organisation (Willmott 1983). It is the management of organisational culture that merely drives the

Organisational culture refers to ‘the shared beliefs and values guiding the thinking and behavioural styles of members’ (Cooke and Rousseau, 1988, in Bratton 2010: 334), indicating that employees who accept the common values of an organisation and put great effort on commitments are likely to build up a strong culture to an organisation.

Delisi (1990) using Schein’s (1984) definition of culture, to examine the relationship between culture and change, defined organisational culture as ‘the pattern of basic assumptions that a given group have invented, discovered or developed in learning to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, and that has worked well enough in the past to be considered valid, and, therefore to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems’.

The business dictionary (Business Dictionary 2014) defines organisational culture as the ‘values and behaviours that contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization’. An organisation's culture is important in ensuring that the performance of the business meets or exceeds the expectations of all aspects of their business, from management to the wider community as a whole. The culture dictates the ways employees interact and brings all the employees on a common platform to extract the best of each member. An organisations culture should be in line with the predefined goals, visions and values outlined in the mission statement.

Strong culture is said to exist where staff respond to stimulus because of the alignment to organizational values. In Weak Culture there is little alignment with organizational values and control must be exercised through

Culture, a multi-dimensional notion that resides in all individuals, yet is also the same hidden force that separates most behavioral patterns seen inside and outside of organizations (Schein, 2004). Understanding organizational culture is important because it aids in the awareness of the life of an organization, which is relative since it is believed that organizational culture impacts the performance of an enterprise, but just as leadership plays a vital in creating the organization’s culture, they are also essential in how successful the business is during times of change. In effective leadership, one of the most critical features noted is change, but being able to manage change is probably one of the most important, yet difficult

Organizational culture is constructed on communal perspectives, convictions, traditions, and inscribed and unrecorded administrates which have been arisen over a while and are deemed acceptable. Furthermore, corporate culture, it 's demonstrated in the manner the establishment accomplishes its transactions, regards its workforces, consumers, and the broader communal; correspondingly, organizational culture entails the degree to which liberty is allowable in decision making, fostering modernistic philosophies, and individual manifestation, by what means authority and information surge through its hierarchy, and exactly how dedicated workforces are regarding cooperative objectives. (Business Dictionary, 2016)

Just like people do, every organisation has its own personality; we refer to it as its culture. Even if it’s not visible, organisational culture is what shapes the behaviour of the people working in a company. Tichy (1982) said that organizational culture

Tharp (2009) explains how most definitions of organizational culture include the concept of shared meaning, which shows that organizational culture can only be developed within groups. Secondly, organizational culture is socially constructed according to the location of the organization, its history, the working environment, and certain events that surround it (Tharp, 2009). Finally, most definitions claim that organizational culture is multidimensional and involves both cognitive and