“That’s the Way We Do Things Around Here”: An Overview of Organizational Culture

• Organizational culture determines how an organization operates and how its members frame events both inside and outside the organization.
• Organizational culture consists of an organization’s shared values, symbols, behaviors, and assumptions,(“the way we do things around here”)
• 3 levels of organizational culture
  • Artifacts
    • Symbolic meaning of the organization’s values
  • Values
    • When there is an issue and managers need to thwart it, the decisions they make validates the plan and becomes a shared value in the company. If the crisis arises again, there is already a plan in place to deal with it. After repeated success, the value becomes an underlying assumption within the company
  • Underlying assumptions
    • Basic core of the company
    • Must be immersed in the culture of the company to know
    • manifest themselves through the perceptions, thoughts, emotions, and behaviors of members of the organization
• Climate v. Culture
  • Climate is day to day feelings, able to change at a moment’s notice with temporary changes within the company
  • Culture is more permanent and lasting, changes at a slower rate than climate. Can be used to explain and create end results
• Three Levels of Organization: individual, employee & group identity, organization. First two must be accomplished before the latter.
• Making of Culture
  • Organizational culture is formed from four major areas: how an organization uses its resources, an organization’s structure, the people within the organization, and the process of completing the work of an organization. The mission and goals established by an organization define these four areas. The focus and direction that an organization’s mission and goals provides determines how the organization will allocate its resources and complete the work at hand
  • Consists of friendliness among collegues (but not too much sociability) and solidarity
  • Requires data from 5 areas: desire for results, work environment, organization perspective, sharing of power and risk. Communication tells the most
• Types of culture: power, achievement, role and support

http://0-web.b.ebscohost.com.pacificatclassic.pacific.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=3&sid=d6c6154b-8f90-4e5c-bcc6-614005e0e933%40sessionmgr120

Organizational Power and Culture Shift at Ducati motorcycles

• Ducati was sold to a new company and the new owners realized the old business model and culture of Ducati was not working and they wanted to modernize the motorcycle company.

https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-is-organizational-culture

What Is Organizational Culture? And Why Should We Care?

This article tries to define organizational culture and gives examples of what that looks like in the workplace. I think we could use this as a good basis for guiding us to decide what kind of culture we want to have in our company. Some takeaways that I think we should know from this are:

• Culture is consistent and observable patterns in behavior
• Culture is shaped by incentives, both monetary and non-monetary
• Culture can be used to tell the “story” of an organization and why they are in business
• Organizational Culture is shaped by the larger societies that the organization is a part of
  • I think we should take this into consideration and look into the culture of the industry as a whole before we pick a culture for our business
• Culture is dynamic and can be constantly shifting
• Prevents “wrong thinking” in organization
• Shaped by larger society we live in but focuses more on certain areas

http://0-web.a.ebscohost.com.pacificatclassic.pacific.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=5&sid=d3c55d34-cd28-44ef-8e22-e4f9f4c63095%40sessionmgr4006

The Improvement of Labor Activity Motivation of Workers in the Process of Their Socialization in the Organization: The Influence of Organizational Culture

This article discusses the dynamic organizational culture creates in a workplace and how it reinforces certain behaviors and teaches an employee to abstain from doing other certain behaviors that the company does not believe or condemns. I like how this article divides socialization of employees into three stages: employment, adaptation, and interaction. I think we could look further into this and use it in our paper. Table 1 in this article shows examples of possible types of culture we could look at.