Organizational Culture

Organizational culture is a system of shared values, norms, and assumptions that guides members’ attitudes and behaviors and influences how they perceive and react to their environment. These assumptions are usually taken for granted by organizational members, and are taught to new members as they are socialized into the group. An organization’s culture is reflected in how it gets work done and how employees interact with each other. It takes a long time for a culture to evolve, and a long time to change it. When culture supports business strategy, the firm can become high performing.

Trust is the foundation of culture, and is earned through repeated interactions over time. When a positive culture be comes strong enough, employee interactions become more efficient. Relationships improve, and employees cooperate to achieve common goals. Common organizational culture themes include ethics, innovation, being casual or formal, and collaboration. Of course, as important as it is to create and maintain the right culture, doing so is not necessarily easy.

Cultures are made up of formal and informal practices , artifacts, espoused values and norms, and assumptions. Organizational culture is the key to organizational excellence and the function of leadership is the creation and management of culture.

A leader has to define the culture to support the business strategy, consistently behave in ways that demonstrate the culture, explain the culture to employees so they understand why it is critical, and then hold him or herself and others accountable for maintaining it. An organization’s culture of inclusion reflects the extent to which majority members value efforts to increase minority representation, and whether the qualifications and abilities of minority members are questioned.

Firms develop distinct conflict cultures, or shared norms for managing conflict, which reflect different degrees of active versus passive and agreeable versus disagreeable conflict management norms. When managers attempt to change organization culture, they are attempting to change people’s basic assumptions about what is and is not appropriate behavior in the organization.