Organizational Culture Research

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Organizational culture
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Organizational culture is an idea in the field of organizational studies and management which describes the psychology, attitudes, experiences, beliefs and values (personal and cultural values) of an organization. It has been defined as "the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization."[1] Ravasi and Schultz (2006) state that organizational culture is a set of shared mental assumptions that guide interpretation and action in organizations by defining appropriate behavior for various situations. Although it’s difficult to get consensus about the
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According to Kotter and Heskett (1992), organizations with adaptive cultures perform much better than organizations with unadaptive cultures. An adaptive culture translates into organizational success; it is characterized by managers paying close attention to all of their constituencies, especially customers, initiating change when needed, and taking risks. An unadaptive culture can significantly reduce a firm's effectiveness, disabling the firm from pursuing all its competitive/operational options.
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Typologies
Several methods have been used to classify organizational culture. While there is no single “type” of organizational culture and organizational cultures vary widely from one organization to the next, commonalities do exist and some researchers have developed models to describe different organizational cultures. Some are described below:
Hofstede (1980[2]) demonstrated that there are national and regional cultural groupings that affect the behavior of organizations.
Hofstede looked for national differences between over 100,000 of IBM's employees in different parts of the world, in an attempt to find aspects of culture that might influence business behavior.
Hofstede identified four dimensions of culture in his study of national influences: * Power distance - The degree to which a society expects there to be differences in the levels of power. A high score suggests that there is an
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