'What is an organizational culture? Explain both how the culture of an organization might evolve and why an understanding of organizational culture is important?

Culture can be defined as a set of shared values, shared beliefs and customary ways of thinking doing things, which shape and guides the ways of organisational members. Culture is therefore very crucial as it has the ability to influence the processes or the activities of employees and the functioning of the organisation without necessarily imposing measures and control.

“Culture consists of the symbols, rituals, language, and social dramas that highlight organizational life, including myths, stories, and jargon. It includes the shared meanings associated with the symbols, rituals, and language. Culture combines the philosophy of the firm with beliefs, expectations, and values shared by members. It contains the stories and myths about the company's founder and its current leading figures. 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. An organization's culture determines how it perceives and reacts to the larger environment (Becker, 1982; Schein, 1996). Culture determines the nature

Organizational culture is the summation of the underlying organizational values manifesting as collective assumptions, attitudes, beliefs, expectations and norms.  Grounded in the customs and

Culture within an organisation is a system of shared values, beliefs and norms of individuals in the organisation and how the value consensus creates a way in which people behave. The shared values have a strong influence on the individuals in the organisation and dictates how a person acts, dresses and performs in their job. A unique culture is developed and maintained by an organisation which provides guidelines and boundaries, through informal means, for the behaviour of the people within the organisation.

Culture is the system of shared values, beliefs, attitudes and norms that guides what is considered

Organizational Cultures : We know that organizational cultures is the collection of shared beliefs, values, rituals, stories, myths, and specialized language that foster a feeling of community among organization members. Cultures based largely on taken granted factors which exerts a powerful influence on

A strong organizational culture provides both the company and its employees with direction and stability. The culture within an organization can be powerful enough to effect employee attitude and behavior as well as performance and turnover ratio. According to many scientific studies, there are seven primary characteristics used to define the culture of an organization: innovation and risk taking, outcome orientation, people orientation, team orientation, aggressiveness and stability.

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,

Organizational culture is a system of shared assumptions, values, and beliefs that helps individuals understand which behaviors are and are not appropriate within an organization. Cultures can be a source of competitive advantage for organizations. Strong organizational cultures can be an organizing as well as a controlling

Culture play major role within the organization. It exists and plays a very crucial role in carving organization’s behavior. Organizational culture positively influences organizational behavior. People join number of organizations during their life. The organizations act as social tools to build the relationships between the individuals. Organizations are boundary maintaining, socially constructed and goal directed system, which focuses on the processes involved in the persistence, genesis and ethics of organizations. The individual will have to co-operate with the organization to achieve goals.

Def: This definition suggests that organizational culture reflects what is common, typical, and general for the organization. Values, beliefs, and behaviors that are uncommon in the organization, or specific to a particular subgroup within an organization, would not be considered to be part of the culture of the organization.

The success and failure of an organization in the current competitive business environment is dependent on its ability to understand and continuously appraise the culture and subcultures within the business. This means the ability to manage corporate culture by making the necessary adjustments based on prevailing circumstances (Hagberg and Heifetz, 2000).

According to Kummerow and Kirby (2013), organizational culture is patterns of shared values, beliefs and assumptions developed by an organization as it looks for ways to cope with issues of internal integration and external adaptation. Consequently, it will govern how individual behave within the organization and the culture is tough to any new member of the organization so that they know the correct way to think, feel and perceive issues within the organization. Culture is an important part of any company, it provides and controls the way staff members behave in

A well-known fact that organizational culture is hard to define because of its complexity, and it seems that most of existing definitions are general and macroscopic. For example, organizational culture supplies members of organization with principles of behaviors with the help of essential, common values in the organization, and these principles are usually approved and accepted by internal members (Baird et al. 2007; Chatman & Jehn, 1994; Deshpandé & Webster, 1989; Narver & Slater, 1998; as cited in Cynthia Webster & Allyn White, 2010). And organizational culture means correspondingly fixed faiths, manners and norms that are agreed by organizational members commonly (Williams, Dobson & Walters, 1993; as cited in Catherine T. Kwantes & Cheryl A. Boglarsky, 2007). Organizational culture is also defined as “shared normative beliefs and shared behavioural expectations” or “a particular set of

Organizational culture is" The collection of traditional, value, policies, beliefs and attitudes that constitute a pervasive context for everything we do and thin in an organization".