organisational culture

• Culture is a complex whole that includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals, law, customs, and other capabilities and habits acquired by humans as members of society.
• Organizational culture is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one group or category of people from others.
• Countries that are known for their high level of work ethos, such as Japan or Germany face the situation, where traditional patterns are being broken as a result of the labor force getting increasingly younger, the rise in the level of wealth and the spreading of consumerism.
• Organizational culture is a pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, a product of joint learning.
• Organizational culture serves as "glue" that holds an organization together and provides directions.
• Culture is an ecosystem, living and changing, and is a shadow of the leader.
• Critics of the iceberg metaphor argue that it is too simplistic and does not reflect the complexity of culture.
• The cultural pyramid includes artifacts, norms and values, and cultural assumptions.
• Artifacts in culture include all the manufactured articles of a given culture and these constitute the element that stands out the most.
• Norms and values are the beliefs and standards that a given community believes to be right and normal and also that, which it believes to be valuable.
• Cultural assumptions are the fundaments that the entire organizational culture is based on and refer to the human nature, interpersonal relations, the nature of the organization, its environment and the relations of the organization with its environment.
• The culture web enables rapid and efficient communication, standardizes behaviors, increases predictability and replaces control, unifies interpretation and evaluation of reality, creates common aspirations, goals, hopes and fears, and is subject to the process of being entrenched in the psyche of the organizational members.
• Acculturation or socialization involves instilling culture in an individual through a group, often done by means of a reward and punishment system.
• Rewards and punishments are influenced by the competitive environment, which is often inflicted by competitors.
• Legal factors cause resistance and are under the pain of legal sanctions, in the long term they also lead to cultural changes, and in particular to the development of new norms and patterns.
• Japanese quality management concepts such as “quality circles” or “Just-In-Time” and American “sales”, “promotions”, “discount stores” are becoming more and more common.
• Punishments lack rewards but also involve active actions undertaken against the “unruly” individual, such as sabotaging the activities performed by the individual, negative feedback, derogatory rumors, low prestige and a general lack of support from the group, and in extreme cases isolation and ostracism, i.e banishment from the group.
• Partners and peer groups, which operate in the same business and jointly apply certain standards, can also be a source of enforcements that change the organizational culture.
• In the industrial sector, the collaboration with partners that apply quality management systems (such as the ISO-system) enforces the implementation of the same systems including their spontaneously applied (i.e culturally sanctioned) norms and patterns.
• Accreditation systems in business schools enforce cultural changes that entail involving business and international partners in the decision-making processes.
• The organizational culture transforms under the influence of changes of the broader social structure in which an organization functions.
• Internationalization is an important source of cultural changes in organizations, as organizations demonstrate a natural tendency to imitate those that are the most successful.
• Technological change often brings cultural changes, such as the changes in behavioral norms and patterns in industries like aerial transport, tourism, accommodation, and some spheres of the trade industry.
• Aging or increase of the share of young people, an increase in the level of education of the populations as well as changes in the level of wealth can influence the organizational culture.
• Rewards in acculturation or socialization include voluntarily providing collaboration and support in the activities performed by the individual, recognition, prestige, popularity and all kinds of spontaneous honorable distinctions.