Understanding Organizational Culture: Key Elements & Dynamics

Understanding Organizational Culture

Culture encompasses the fundamental assumptions shared by members of a community. These presumptions, shared thoughts, meanings, and values create a backdrop for action, often taken as obvious and undisputed.

Key Components of Culture

Analyzing culture involves understanding its components and defining features that make it unique:

• Appearance: Fixed aspects of organization and decoration, including the structuring of space.
• Patterns of Behavior: Systematic collective life within the organization.
• Language: Use of metaphors, stories, legends, and myths.
• Implicit Rules: Unwritten norms and standards governing conduct.
• Values: Used to judge facts, actions, and people.
• Assumptions: Basic beliefs shared by members of the culture.
• History: Reveals the true concerns and feeds popular wisdom.

Strength of Culture

The strength of a culture determines its importance and influence on behavior and thought. Key factors include:

• Penetration: Breadth of consensus regarding the content of the culture and its sphere of influence.
• Uniformity: Consistency or strength of its components.
• Clarity: Accessibility of knowledge and understanding of the meaning of its components.

Orientation

Orientation reflects how an organization balances stability and change:

• Retrospective: Sustainability and permanence of components over time.
• Foresight: Predominant tendency toward stability or change.

Social Roles Within the Organization

Understanding the roles members play in the social network is crucial:

• Heroes: Embody the values of the organization.
• Narrators: Shape understanding of organizational acts.
• Priests: Offer advice and solutions.
• Gossips and Spies: Collect seemingly meaningless information that gains symbolic value.
• Dissidents: Drive organizational evolution.
• Snitches: Disruptive individuals who abuse power.
• Coalitions: Subcultures within the organization.

Organizational States

Organizations can exist in various states:

• Impasse/Sink: Entrenched sense of failure, low expectations, and external blame. External support is beneficial.
• Walkers/Walk: Rely on past successes without striving for new objectives.
• Misled/Struggle: Experience innovation in fragmented areas.
• Dynamic/Advanced: Balance development and stability with teamwork and active staff participation.