TERM PAPER ON
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
Inhalt
Organizational culture and its various manifestations. 2
Key characteristics of organizational Culture. 5
Organizational Culture and Managers:-6
Organizational Culture and Classroom Environment:-8
Organizational culture and its various manifestations
Organizational culture refers to the values, belief and practices that represent and influence the way that organization functions and differs from one another. It is the perception of the employees based on their experience and circumstances created by the organization.
An organization may consist of individuals with different characteristics but inside the organization they might have created the shared culture and behave similarly. The pattern of values, norms, beliefs, activities, principles assumptions may be written or verbal behavior that describes the way in which the things get done.
Each and every organization adopts the specific organizational culture in order to accomplish day to day activities to reach the goal of the organization and if the organization is large enough, they might have different sub cultures.
For example, in our organization (Medical college), decision is made by the top authority and called the professors for meeting to discuss their issues but lower level staffs are never called for meetings and decisions are unidirectional from top to down.
But the culture is not adopted by all the departments. One of the department adopted exactly the same trend where only the professor sit for meeting, discuss their issues and over. But few departments include the lower level staffs in their meeting.
There may be different individuals in an organization with different ideas, cultural values, psychology and working priorities but once they enter inside any organization, they adopt the culture of the organization irrespective of their personal mindset.
They develop the common values, belief and practices and hence can work together to achieve the goal. This is how the multicultural company is being successful, since they develop harmony among the variety. Otherwise, we can imagine how would be the multinational organization at Brazil with Australian Manager, Indian worker and Chinese investors. These all show that organizational culture binds all the stakeholders so that they can accomplish the assigned work together and achieve their target.
Organizational culture is developed by the so called leaders, not necessarily the founder of the organization. Once the organizational culture is set up, verbally or written, they select the member who will fit in the organization and the new comers will automatically divert themselves into the culture adopted by the organization.
For instance, when I joined the school at Balaju as a teacher, I found that the playground was full of papers and other wastage of the breakfast students brings in with them, no dustbin on the playground. The students are not aware of sanitation. Then I personally bought one big dustbin and put it on one of the corner of the playground. I request the Principal and other staffs to join me to clean the playground and then I request all the students to use the dustbin.
I used to punish those who throw their rubbish on the playground and after few months, everyone began to use dustbin. New comers on the new session also use the dustbin when they see others using it. After 4 months, Principal bought 3 more dustbins and put on four corners of the playground and now it is clean. This is how the culture is developed within organization.
The culture may also be developed from organization's founder. On the same organization, everyone come with uniform that was prescribed by the organization beforehand.
The organizational culture can be tiered into three levels based on their visibility.
They are:-
a. Artifacts and Behavior
b. Values
c. Assumptions and Beliefs
There are various types of organizational culture. Some of them are:-
a. Normative Culture: - These types of culture have the predefined set of rules and regulations that the employee has to strictly follow and hence nobody dares to break those rules and obey the policies of the organization.
b. Pragmatic Culture: - Organizations with this culture treats their customers as a god and perform their best in order to make their customers satisfied and can even go beyond their policy if appropriate.
c. Academy Culture: - In this culture, organizations believes in education, qualification and experience of the employee. They try their best to provide the skills to their employees and management makes sincere efforts to improve their professional competence.
d. Club Culture: - These organizations hire specific employees with their expertise on the jobs they are hired for. They regularly perform the appraisals and promote suitably.
e. Fortress Culture: - Organizations with this culture are not sure of employee's career and longevity. The employees will be terminated if the organization suffers.
g. Bet you company culture: - These organizations are the risk bearers and employees may wait years for the result.
h. Process Culture: - Organizations with this culture had predefined processes and procedures developed to be followed by the employees. Feedback and performance reviews are not much important.
Similarly Charles Handy had classified the organizational culture into four major types. They are
a. Power Culture: - This culture is suitable for the family owned business or small sized business where the power is centralized to limited or single person. All the decision is preserved and hence there is no consultation that may result to dis-satisfaction and de-motivation that ultimately cause high turnover of the employees.
b. Role Culture: - The organizations with this culture are divided into different functional units and each individual are selected for the some particular role which they are specialized for. Since the employees are selected for their specialization, this may increase the productivity.
d. Person Culture: - Individuals within these organizations determine the path which the organization pursues. They reject formal hierarchies and exist solely to meet the needs of their members.
Organizational Culture is very important for the following reasons:-
a. Healthy culture always encourages the employees to be motivated, try to perform their best to earn recognition and appreciation from superiors and became loyal towards the organization.
b. The organizational culture provides the employees the way and guidelines for their work.
c. Organizational culture helps each individual in an organization to be treated equally and create the brand in the market.
e. Organizational culture is also an effective control mechanism for dictating employee behavior
Key characteristics of organizational Culture
Organizational culture is the set of norms, values, beliefs and attitudes shared by the members of the organization. As the culture in general helps to bind up the people in the community, organizational culture also helps to unify the employees with the help of the common values adopted by the organization. It is also one of the control mechanisms within the organization.
The key characteristics of the organizational culture can be described as follows:-
a. Innovation and Risk Taking:-
Innovation and Risk Taking are two major aspects for the success of any organization. Those organizations that permit their employees for innovation and taking risk, they can progress much faster than those who do not want to take risk.
b. Attention to Detail:-
This is the characteristics of detail oriented culture. In this type of the organization, the detail record of their customers and their preferences, products, suppliers, retailers and so on are kept in order to process them in future for better services next time. For example, if a travel agency may easily provide the best options to him as they will already have his previous records and preferences in their data base.
c. Outcome Orientation :-
There may be deviation amongst the organization whether to follow the process or to reach the ultimate outcome. The organization with outcome oriented culture has the culture of obtaining the outcome or final result. These organizations can deliver a quality product at cost, on time and are responsive to the customers need.
Some organizations give high importance to their employees and treat them accordingly so that the management can create the best working environment but some treat people no more than working machine. People oriented organizations are successful in terms of productivity, quality and outcome and have less turnover.
e. Team Orientation :-
Working individually in recent world is quite difficult and impossible because of changing work dynamics. If we analyze in Nepalese context, few individuals are successful working individually but there are many groups working in a team and are dominant. Hence the team with complementary skills can achieve any kind of outcome easily.
Employees are expected to be aggressive and competitive. The aggression towards fulfilling their goals, duties and assignments promptly enhances productivity, ensure quality and competition amongst the competitor organization may lead the organization towards stability.
g. Stability :-
Most of the organizations in present context don't want to stay stable but wish to have indiscriminate growth. It is slightly related to the innovation and risk taking. Organizations that are not innovative and avoid risk selectively want to remain stable. On the other hand, innovative and risk takers have the higher probability of growth and success.
Organizational Culture and Managers:-
Managers help to manage the culture through following steps:-
a. Creating a climate for change - It is a crucial stage to determine the effect of the organizational culture in productivity and daily activities within the organization. If the culture is favourable, managers must be able to preserve that culture and if there is any problem with the existing culture, then he must create a climate so as to change it to the favourable one.
b. Leaders as champions - The leaders of the organizations are the experts who will determine and manage the organizational culture as well as reward or punish sub cultures depending on whether they follow or not with the company culture adopted by the leaders. The leaders have the greater influence on rewards and reprimands of the sub cultures.
If employees are engaged properly on their duties and responsibilities and are satisfied then it can be understood that the culture within the organization is healthy and working properly and if the condition is worst, managers must understand that it needs some modification.
d. Team Orientation - Team work is most essential in today's world to overcome the barriers and execute the operations smoothly. Managers, while creating the team, can analyze the situation of organizational culture.
If the organizational culture is adopted and accepted by all, there will not be any problem to form and work with the team otherwise, there will be the problem. And Managers ultimately has to decide whether to react on the team or to accommodate with the organizational culture.
The cultural belief of the new employee may be drastically different than the organizational culture adopted. In this case, managers are the responsible person to accommodate the new comer and the culture. Either, he should inform the recruiter to recruit only those persons who can adopt in that environment or he should change the culture itself. For example, If the organization has the provision of providing lunch in office and lunch consists of beef items.
Unfortunately, there is a new comer from Hindu religion, who of course will not eat beef. Then the organization must change the lunch pattern, at least for that one individual.
f. Training, rewards and recognition - Training, rewards and recognition are the most important organizational culture. Top level managers are responsible to find out the employees who need the training, who must be rewarded and recognized.
These all illustrates that the managers are the key characters inside any organization that will shape and align the employees, other members within the organization and culture as a whole. They will analyze the entire situation and react accordingly. Hence organizational culture is important as far as managers are concerned.
Organizational Culture and Classroom Environment:-
The classroom is the multicultural, combination of the professional from different organizations but all the individuals have the common goal to learn business administration. All the individuals are engaged with at least one organization and most of us are from unique organization. The classroom is multicultural on the context of age, profession, ethnicity, religion, language and many more.
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