Organizational Culture As A Key Aspect That Influences Engineering Management

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.

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,

Engineering management is the science and art of organizing, staffing, planning, controlling and directing work processes so as to obtain and achieve shared objectives and goals. Again, in organizational culture, the discipline mainly deals with five human resources that include machines, money, materials and time. When all that is obtained, an engineer in management should inculcate the proper, efficient and effective utilization of resources in a short period with minimal costs. For that purpose, in organizational culture, engineering management is considered as art because it utilizes the skills and techniques of engineers doing work activities. Moreover, it is considered as a science because it works hand in hand with

As a result of the accelerating pace of globalization, business environments in which organizations operate are increasingly turbulent and there is an unprecedented level of competition between rival firms (News.bbc.co.uk, 2016). Owing to this persistent rise in competition, organizations are faced with the dilemma of creating a viable competitive advantage. One way of developing such advantage is by constructing a captivating organizational culture.

Rizescu, M. (2011). Orgainzational Culture Influences on the Organization's Functionality. Revista Academie ForTelor Terestre. 1( 61): 75-82.

Lesley Willcoxson & Bruce Millett ABSTRACT Culture is a term that is used regularly in workplace discussions. It is taken for granted that we understand what it means. The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss some of the significant issues relating to the management of an organisation’s culture. As organisational cultures are born within the context of broader cultural contexts such as national or ethic groupings, the paper will commence by defining ‘culture’ in the wider social context. This definition will subsequently form the basis for discussion of definitions of organisational culture and the paradigms and perspectives that underpin these. The paper will then discuss the issue of

An organizational culture can be defined as a group of different features that differentiates an organization from another organization. A number of researchers have defined the organizational culture as a beliefs, values and customs of an organization. These values and customs are delivered to each employee by the management of an organization. In this modern era of globalization, organizations are competing with each other and in this war of competition, maintaining an organizational culture is highly imperative. There are multiple reasons for this and one of the most significant reasons is to achieve effectiveness (Daft, pg. 34,2010).

The organizational cultural inventory measures 12 sets of normative beliefs or shared behavioral expectations associated with three general types of cultures, Constructive, Passive-Defensive, and Aggressive-Defensive.

Intelligent, thoughtful people can form into organizations that are unproductive and ineffective in relation to their stated missions. This happens often and frequently, and there are many reasons why such a case can occur. This essay will discuss two possible reasons for such ineffectiveness and lack of productivity. Firstly, organizations may have an overall structure that is not conducive to success in relation to their mission. Secondly, the organizational culture affects the organization in such a negative way that the mission becomes clouded in the eyes of many employees and managers.

The key in helping to form and provide an identity for an organisation is in its organisational culture. Northcote and Trevelyan (1853) sought to provide the Civil Service with a distinctive character. Their vision based on four principal recommendations (merit through examination, educational level, graded into a hierarchy and promotion through achievement) has meant the Civil Service has invested heavily in training programmes despite long development times. These circumstances are categorised by Deal and Kennedy (2000) as a “Bet-your-company” type culture.

The term organizational culture is related to the study and understanding of the dynamics involved at a personal as well as a group level in work settings. The term also deals with the nature of the work as well (Kudisch et al. 1995). There are several factors that come into play when people interact in works. Understanding organizational culture is becoming increasingly important since the work is becoming a global village and people with diverse background and culture have to interact and work effectively in any work.

Living in a world of approximately 7.5 billion people mean living with different perspectives, different ideas, different cultures; in other words, we live in a society full of diversities. Throughout this semester, I have learned that an organization cannot function without people. In fact, employees are one of the valuable assets of an organization. Every organization has a corporate culture; thus, living in a world of diversities poses the challenge for companies in maintaining such culture alive. I believe that organizational culture, just like Politics, cannot be avoided within an organization. I am not a mother yet, but based on my observation, organizational culture is like growing up a child that is, it requires of a strong mother (an empowered leader) to nurture a child (culture) with values and confidence which are key elements towards attaining success.

The study of organisational culture is important and significant because it helps shape right decisions for the organisation and outlines the behavioural expectations from employees and also helps them interact with each other. Organisational culture also helps individual employees, groups and the organisation as a whole to manage the assigned work and tasks and meet deadlines. The attitude of stake holders towards the organisation, the organisations ability to accept change and the efficiency of work within the organisation is well understood with the study of organisational culture (Kenneth Desson & Joseph Clouthier, 2010)

Organizational culture influences the working environment for employees and in healthcare organizations, the culture also effects patient outcomes. André, Sjøvold, Rannestad, & Ringdal, (2014) report, “researchers have also found that nurses working in contexts with more positive culture, leadership and evaluation reported more research utilization, staff development and lower rates of patients and staff adverse events” (p. 449). Therefore, it is important that health care organizations focus on establishing a positive culture. Research shows that positive work environments have similar characteristics. Nurse leaders are in an optimal position to influence organizational culture.

’Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from another.’- Hofstede