The Term Organizational Culture Essay

Organizational culture can be defined as a system of shared beliefs and values that develops within an organization and guides the behavior of its members. It includes routine behaviors, norms, dominant values, and a feeling or climate conveyed. The purpose and function of this culture is to help foster internal integration, bring staff members from all levels of the organization much closer together, and enhance their performance.

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,

As known each organization has a set objective to be achieved. Hence depending on the objective & to achieve those objectives, an organization can be structured in many difference ways: the 2 basic division, is the division of labour& coordination & supervision. These are done to be in-line with the organizational objective.

Organizational culture is the stable beliefs, values, and assumptions shared by a group of people. I used to work at a bar and there was a shared understanding between the servers and bartenders. The bartenders were the managers, and each manager had their style of how the bar was ran each night. The servers had their system of who get what section, but they also had to follow the style of each bartender. The instrumental purpose of our organizational culture was influenced by who was managing the bar each night. There were some bartenders who did not like being bothered with questions from the servers and there were some who were nice and helpful. The bartenders that did not care, influenced the servers by letting them choose who had each section, deciding who had to clean and stock, and who was able to leave and at what times.

I work for Cornerstone Services in Joliet, IL. Cornerstone is a not-for-profit organizational that provides vocational, residential and behavioral health services for individuals with chronic mental illness and/or intellectual disabilities ("Cornerstone Services,” 2016). Cornerstone has been serving the Joliet and greater Will County area since 1969, and Kankakee County since 2013, and strives to integrate individuals from institutions and nursing homes into the community and make connections to local resources to enrich the lives of those we serve. A number of therapy programs are offered such as outpatient therapy, group therapy, addiction counseling, psychosocial rehabilitation

Organisational Culture is defined as what the employees perceive and how this perception creates a pattern of beliefs, values and, expectations. Organisational culture differs from organizational climate. Climate refers to more temporary attitudes, feelings and perceptions of individuals (Schneider, 1990). Culture on the other hand is an enduring, slow to change, core characteristic of organisations which is an implicit often indiscernible aspects of organisations, climate refers to more overt, observable attributes of organisations.. Organisational culture is “the way things are” in the organisation rather that people’s transitory attitudes about them

In this paper I will discuss the effects and responsibilities leaders have on an organizational culture. I believe leaders have an enormous effect on the well-being of an organizational culture. Leaders must take an active role within their organization's culture. Whether positive or negative, in an organization, things tend to follow suit "down hill." A leader has the power and influence to maintain, create, or repair an organizational culture. However, this can prove to be a delicate and challenging task.

The collective programming of the human mind that distinguishes one group or category of people from another. In other words, that what many members of a group have in common and by which they distinguish themselves from other groups is called culture.

The following is an observation and analysis of the role an organization’s values play on the development and state of its culture. This analysis is based on five interviews of both male and female workers from a privately owned manufacturing company with annual revenues exceeding a billion dollars. In forming my conclusions, I will analyze the synthesis of data and draw from the classification and examples set forth in the “Workplace Culture and Socialization section of Volti’s “An Introduction to the Sociology of Work and Occupations” Volti (2008) as well as the National Defense University’s

Culture can be defined as “the sum total of the beliefs, rules, techniques, institutions, and artifacts that characterize human populations” or “the collective programming of the mind.

Organisation Culture as there are many ways in which you can define the subject my interpretation of it is that it is structure of shared meaning which is held by members that differentiate the organisation from other organisations. Culture has its origin in the organisational interaction.

Edgar Schein, a famous theorists dealing with organizational culture, provides the following definition for the term: "A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems that has worked well enough to be considered valid and is passed on to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems." (organizationalculture101) However, organizational culture is more than sharing assumptions used by a group to solve problems; it is the combination of the points of view, ineffectual processes, education, backgrounds of all the staff which are part of an organization way of doing things. Corporation culture should uncover from the board of the directors to the rest of

Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1962) identify over 150 scientific definitions of the concept of culture. Indeed, many authors have tried to define culture and this is why there are so many definitions and that a unique one is hard to find. First of all, Kroeber and Kluckholn (1952) assume that culture is a suite of patterns, implicit and explicit, “of and for behaviour acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievements of human groups, including their embodiments in artefacts” (p.47). Later, Hofstede adds that culture is “the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another” (Hofstede, 1991, p.51). This definition is the most widely accepted one amongst practitioners. For Winthrop (1991), culture is the distinctive models of thoughts, actions and values that composed members of a society or a social group. In other words,

'Culture is the collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from another.' (Hofstede, 1991)