Organizational Culture Meaning and Characteristics
Organizational Culture Meaning and Characteristics: To grasp the significance of corporate culture, we must first grasp the significance of culture. “The collection of significant understandings that people of a society hold in common is known as culture.” It is made up of a fundamental collection of values, beliefs, perceptions, preferences, morals, code of behaviour, and other factors that distinguish human groupings.
Culture refers to the pattern of growth reflected in a society’s system of knowledge, philosophy, values, laws, social standards, and daily rituals. Culture varies from society to society depending on the pattern and stage of development. Furthermore, culture is handed down via the generations.
“Culture is a set of variables that are taught via our contact with the environment throughout our formative and growing years,” we may explain in simple terms. We’ll try to define corporate culture now that we’ve grasped the idea of culture.
Organizational Culture Meaning and Characteristics
“Organizational culture is a set of common values and attitudes that emerges inside a company and drives its employees’ behaviour.”
“An organization’s conventional ideals and unwritten standards of conduct, as well as management methods, goals, beliefs, and inters personal behaviour, make up its corporate culture.” They work together to create an environment that affects how individuals communicate, plan, and make choices.”
“The philosophies, ideologies, values, assumptions, beliefs, expectations, attitudes, and conventions that bind a company together and are shared by its personnel are known as organisational culture.”
“Organizational culture can be defined as a pattern of basic assumptions—invented, discovered, or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration—that has worked well enough to be considered valuable and, as a result, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems,” according to Edgar Schein.
The sharing of norms and values that govern organisational members’ behaviour is emphasised in all of the aforementioned definitions of organisational culture. These norms and values provide clear rules for how personnel should conduct themselves both within and outside of the firm.
Organizational Culture Characteristics
- Individual Independence
Individuals’ levels of responsibility, independence, and opportunity to exercise initiative in the company.
- Structure
The extent to which the organisation has defined goals and performance standards. It also refers to the level of direct supervision employed to manage employee behaviour.
- Management Assistance
The extent to which managers give their employees with clear communication, help, warmth, and support.
- Identity
The extent to which members identify with the company as a whole rather than with their specific work group or sector of expertise.
- System for Rewarding Performance
The extent to which an organization’s incentive system, such as wage increases and promotions, is based on employee performance rather than seniority, favouritism, and other factors.
- Tolerance of Conflict
The level of disagreement between coworkers and work groups, as well as the extent to which employees are encouraged to vent their grievances and critiques publicly.
- Tolerance to Risk
Employees are encouraged to be imaginative, ambitious, and risk takers to a certain extent.
- Patterns of Communication
The extent to which communication inside an organisation is limited to the official structure of power.
- Orientation to the End Result
Management’s emphasis on results or outcomes rather than the tools and procedures employed to obtain these goals.
- Orientation of People
The extent to which management choices are made with the effect of results on the people in the company in mind. We receive a comprehensive picture of the organization’s culture when we evaluate it on the basis of the aforementioned criteria. This image creates the foundation for members’ shared conventions, values, and knowledge of the organisation, how things are done inside it, and how they are expected to act.