Organizational Culture And Structure

Organizational is comprised of core values, beliefs and basic assumptions within organizational life which helps guide and coordinate member behavior. Edgar Schein, a preeminent scholar of organizational culture research, argues that people can come to know organizational culture based on three levels of awareness known as: artifacts, values and beliefs, and basic underlying assumptions.

Throughout this essay organisational culture will be examined, including the two approaches mainstream and critical. What managers can do to shape culture and also an example of when culture has in fact been changed.

To understand the organizational culture of a company, one needs to start by looking at the history. Lakeshore Learning Materials was born from a divorced mother of three named Ethelyn Kaplan, who took a dream and a chance by moving her family to California in 1954 to open a toy store. When she started noticing that teachers were interested in her material, Ethelyn realized that she needed to expand her business into educational materials. 60 years later, Lakeshore Learning Materials has grown into a company with over 2000 employees, 60 retail stores throughout the United States and growing. Lakeshore Learning Materials is currently headed by Ethelyn’s grandsons, Bo and Josh Kaplan. Under the supervision of Bo and Josh, Lakeshore continues to be a leader in the Educational Materials, yet still able to keep the family culture that their grandmother started. Highest quality customer service and hard work are the core values that shape Lakeshore’s Organizational Strategy. These high expectations aren’t hard for employees at Lakeshore because the company is so loved by everyone that works there, that they give nothing less than the best.

(10 pts.) Discuss how organizational architecture and corporate culture are related. Use an example of a real-life firm and discuss how its corporate culture blends with its organizational architecture.

Organizational structure has been set up to facilitate all goal achievements. It is a way to motivate their employees and get them to work together. It also helps its employees to follow the organizations goals, and work together as a team. In order to do this, they need to have an organized structure to be able to run the company smoothly. A main foundation of every organization is to post their mission statement and goals everywhere so that their employees can see them. An organizational culture can consist of common shared beliefs and values that are established by the organization’s leader, and then communicated and reinforce through various methods, this helps shape employee perceptions, behaviors and understanding. Overall, organizational structure and culture can effect progress of many organizations in a positive and negative way.

The organization culture as a leadership concept has been identified as one of the many components that leaders can use to grow a dynamic organization. Leadership in organizations starts the culture formation process by imposing their assumptions and expectations on their followers. Once culture is established and accepted, they become a strong leadership tool to communicate the leader 's beliefs and values to organizational members, and especially new comers. When leaders promote ethical culture, they become successful in maintaining organizational growth, the good services demanded by the society, the ability to address problems before they become disasters and consequently are competitive against rivals. The leader 's success will depend to a large extent, on his knowledge and understanding of the organizational culture. The leader who understands his organizational culture and takes it seriously is capable of predicting the outcome of his decisions in preventing any anticipated consequences. What then is organizational culture? The concept of organizational culture has been defined from many perspectives in the literature. There is no one single definition for organizational culture. The topic of organizational culture has been studied from many perspectives and disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, organizational behavior, and organizational leadership to name a few. Deal defines organizational culture as values,

As known each organization has a set objective to be achieved. Hence depending on the objective & to achieve those objectives, an organization can be structured in many difference ways: the 2 basic division, is the division of labour& coordination & supervision. These are done to be in-line with the organizational objective.

“Organizational culture consists of a set of shared meanings and values held by a set of members in an organization that distinguish the organization from other organizations” (Baack, 2012). These shared values have a strong influence on the people in the organization and dictate how they dress, act, and perform their jobs. Culture plays a huge role in the guiding of the behaviors of employees of an organization. There are three stages of culture that interact with one another to influence the behaviors in the organization. These stages are: observable artifacts, espoused values, and enacted values.

Organisational Culture is defined as what the employees perceive and how this perception creates a pattern of beliefs, values and, expectations. Organisational culture differs from organizational climate. Climate refers to more temporary attitudes, feelings and perceptions of individuals (Schneider, 1990). Culture on the other hand is an enduring, slow to change, core characteristic of organisations which is an implicit often indiscernible aspects of organisations, climate refers to more overt, observable attributes of organisations.. Organisational culture is “the way things are” in the organisation rather that people’s transitory attitudes about them

According to Mclean and Marshall (1993) organisational culture is defined as the collection of traditions, values, policies, beliefs and attitudes that contribute a pervasive context for everything we do and think in an organisation. (ie) this means that these factors actually determine how we think as well as act and react not only to people from within the same organisation but also to anybody on the outside who has some sort of interaction with the organisation. As can be seen with the part-structure in Figure 1, this organisation (WHD) has various levels of management. There is quite

The formal reporting lines refers to the communication between directors, managers, and those employees under them in the organizational structure while the informal reporting line refers to the communication that occurs between health care professionals in the course of the decision-making process, i.e. nurse to physician discussing a patient. Informal communication also can be peer to peer regarding conflict, policy, or safety issues. If a decision is made between the peers, the formal reporting line can be entered in with the peers taking the information up the chain to the managers and directors. Often informal reporting becomes formal reporting. In my organization our formal reporting line starts with the unit charge nurse, proceeding to the team coordinator, the director

Edgar Schein (2004) proposed three levels of organisational culture. As employees go through changes, they gain experiences from the past, adapt to a new environment and develop ability to solve problem. The first level is artefacts, which include all visible characteristics of an organisation, for instance, the architectures/furniture in the office, uniforms of employees and language. These are the observable elements of an organisational culture and might influence the way and attitude of how the employees work. The second level is espoused values in which the influence patterns of observable behaviour at work can be recognised. Each member will impose dominant values and rules of conduct about the culture and these affect employees’ certainty to work under a particular area. The perceived value that can demonstrate reliability and be scientifically tested will be transformed into assumption. It then comes to the third stage of basic assumptions which are taken into granted and are difficult to change. When an assumption or belief about human nature was supported to be worked successfully, this frames how the reality should be and shapes

Organizational culture is a system of shared meanings and common beliefs held by organization member that determine in large degree how they act towards each other. Conveyed through rituals, stories, and social indoctrination.

Organisational culture is the shared values, beliefs, assumptions and morals which govern the behaviour of people in an organisation. This paper is focused on providing insight on four key theories of organisational culture and the analysis on the differences and similarities exists between the theories. This paper also aims at elaborating the importance and usefulness of these theories for individuals and line managers.

* Political science in explaining how power struggles between groups within organisations can stem from variances in performance and agendas.