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Essay about Organizational Culture

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Organizational culture influences many aspects of workplace life. A workplace with strong beliefs, values, behaviors, ideas and expectations define an organization. Well-communicated beliefs, values, ideas and expectations influence employee's behavior and determine how employees communicate with others throughout the organization, thus defining the organization's culture. Over the years, the topic of organizational culture has been studied in many disciplines from anthropology to sociology. A prominent theorist of organizational culture, Edgar Schein (2004), provided the following general definition of organizational culture:
A pattern of shared basic assumptions that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external …show more content…

Opposite of economical approach is the organizational development approach. This approach focuses on the culture of the organization while developing the employee's competencies. Organizational development approach is intended to development the employee's commitment to the organization (Hellriegel, 2004). In our efforts to find more effective ways to reward employees, we developed a committee to review our performance evaluation and merit increase procedures. The purpose of this committee was to evaluate the procedures and make recommendations for improvement. By taking this approach, the employees have developed a sense of commitment to the organization and a sense of value as an employee.
Once an approach has been identified, there are several elements that can be modified or changed that will impact the organization's culture. These elements include changing 1) what managers and teams pay attention to, 2) how crisis are handled, 3) criteria for recruiting new members, 4) criteria for promotion, 5) criteria for allocating awards, and 6) organizational rites and ceremonies (Hellriegel, 2004). To implement a change to culture, organizations can change the criteria for recruiting new employees. For instance, typically our recruitment procedures included advertising externally and internally for a period of two weeks for open positions. We have been unsuccessful at

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