Organizational Culture

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.

“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.

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

Organizational culture at our place of employment can promote improved patient outcomes. How we feel about ourselves, our personal investment and our relationship to our work environment are additional factors that contribute to patient satisfaction and our sense of professionalism and accomplishment (Manojlovich & Ketefian, 2002). We will look at the role of our organizational structure and its impact and contribution to the issues involving Nurse A.

The Organisational Cultural Model helps you to categorise organisational cultures in a handy and operational way. Consisting of six autonomous dimensions or variables and two semi-autonomous dimensions. Geert's research has shown that organizational cultures differ at six different levels - Means-oriented vs. Goal-oriented , Internally driven vs. Externally driven

The culture of an organization is like a river. It can be fluid, strong and consistent, serving as lubricant while guiding its members in the right direction. In contrast a river can become stale and toxic, silently killing those who drink at its shore.1

Due to the intangible aspect of organizational culture, clearly defining and identifying an organization’s culture is difficult, especially for outsiders. Since culture influences many important aspects of operations, organizations use observable symbols and other observable aspects to display their culture to their employees and the external environment. Therefore, culture consists of

Organizational culture influences many aspects of work life. Workplace cultures that are grounded in strong and formally articulated values and modes of behavior define an organization. Well-communicated values influence employee behavior and drive how employees relate with all stakeholders within the organization—from co-workers, management and members of the board to clients, shareholders and the community at large. When organizations seek to change their culture, HR—as change agent and educator of the change process—plays a significant role in this endeavor. In addition, HR's role is both up front and in the background, by leading, supporting, coaching, encouraging, measuring and evaluating the change during the process and over time.

Organizations as culture are able to create a vision for leaders to use in order to guide organizational objectives. It can also provide a perspective so followers can measure their leader’s performance in achieving the vision. Organizational culture can determine the way employees interact at the workplace and helps guide and give them a sense of direction at the workplace. Through observing Foundation, the following provide examples to demonstrate how Foundation is operating within the culture metaphor:

Life is stressful and the value of the healthy organization is measured by the quality of the work-life balance of the employees. Even the best-managed organizations have stressors occurring on the regular and the irregular periods. Those regular stressors, such as quarterly reports or financial tides are expected. The unplanned and often unsuspected stressors occur within the organization. These unplanned stressors will create chaos and an unhealthy organization.

Organizational culture is also known as "corporate culture” that has a major impact on the performance of organization and especially on the quality of work life experienced by the employees. If people in the organization follow the same culture and accept the cultures as well, there would be unity formed within the organization that would lead to higher levels of efficiency resulting in an increase in the levels of performance. It is known that an increase in performance can lead to the development of a culture, which could lead to culture homogeneity in the way the organization works. A common culture results in having a common goal. People would agree to the decisions made more easily and be motivated to work, as the decisions made are the same as the

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

The Organizational Culture Theory analyzes the various cultural aspects of organizations, most notably the five metaphorical performances, the seven cultural markers, and the notion of culture being something an organization is versus culture being something an organization has. The five metaphorical performances are ritual, passion, sociality, politics, and enculturation. Rituals are certain events that are done at certain times, such as getting coffee at a certain time every day. Passion is how one describes their mundane work through stories that indicate how they see it as just the opposite of boring. Sociality describes acts among workers in the organization that can bring them together, such as joking or

This cultural perspective is a theory that is being used all the time and will not change. Cultures are seen as structured by two forms of constrain on individual behavior (Thompson, Ellis, and Wildavsky, 1991). The cultural perspective on organizations believes that each of the organizations establish a distinctive mixture of values, standards, presumptions, and practices about how things should be done that eventually becomes a habit (Kirst-Ashman, 2014). The cultural theory is to go on with their tradition on what they are used to do. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it (Kirst-Ashman, 2014). Because of how much they are used to their way working, it becomes