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Organizational Culture And The Social Environment Of The Workplace

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Foundation Organizational culture was discovered to be an important factor in the social environment of the workplace. The attitudes and beliefs of employees and management are what have shaped the culture of an organization. The culture of an organization has been particularly important in the healthcare setting because it has shaped the type of healthcare that the patients receive within the healthcare organization (Sovie, 1993). The construct organizational culture was developed after the term organizational climate, which was previously used in place of organizational culture. Organizational climate was described as the behavior patterns of people in social climates (Lewin, Lippitt, and White, 1939). Organizational climate was also used to describe the characteristics of the organizational environment that was experienced by the members and how that environment affected their behavior. (Tagiuri and Litwin, 1968). The term organizational culture was needed to be determined because organizational climate was not establishing what exactly a work environment was. Many organizations used organizational culture as a way to offer members of an organization an understanding of the environment they were working in, as well as to study how employee satisfaction has correlated with organizational culture. The term organizational culture was most recently described by the sociologist Schein (1987) as, “Organizational culture is the pattern of basic assumptions which a given

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