Importance Of Managing Organisational Culture
Importance Of Managing Organisational Culture
Introduction
Brown (1995) defines organisational culture as the principles, beliefs, norms and cultures that characterise a specific organisation. Organisational culture is not a static principle as it changes over time. There are certain aspects that shape organisational culture as explained by Schein (1985); the first one being the proprietors of that particular company. Another factor is the values held by the firm’s employees. In addition, competitors within the industry a company is operating in will also affect this. There is also a need to respond customer needs and requirements. All the factors stated above will change with time and consequently affect organisational culture. (Gordon, 1991) One can therefore say that organisational culture is mainly described by group factors such as ideology and concepts; there is a need to include normative behaviour when tackling this issue.
Organisational culture is not something that can be seen very easily it is therefore quite hard to replace it. Normally when certain leaders form a company, their values are translated into the actions of the members of that organisation. (Bate 1994) When other leaders take over, it may not be as easy to change those perspectives immediately. Sometimes some of their actions; like rewards may change the ways employees go about their day to day activities but it may be difficult to change their culture.
Importance of managing organisational culture
Schein’s views
Schein (1985) asserts that it is important to manage organisational culture because he believes the latter term is the key to attainment of excellence within any one organisation. He also believes that leaders are given the task of creating and also managing organisational culture. Managers who are able to identify organisational culture can then build up on the following important aspects;
learning levels
productivity
strategic development
There are certain impediments or strong points that may be created as a result of organisational culture. Structure and methods available for organisations need to be streamlined to suite certain common cultural insights in the organisation. Leaders must identify the elements of organisational culture that will come in the way of achieving organisational goals and eliminate them while at the same time, managers must ensure that they reinforce elements of their organisational culture that facilitate success. (Gordon, 1991)
It should be noted that organisational culture makes a company what it is; it gives the organisation a sense of identity. Consequently, members within that organisation will feel connected to that organisation because of its culture. It should be noted that despite the fact that culture is synonymous to a certain organisations, one should realise that there may be certain differences within one firm. There may be existence of sub cultures in the organisation and when a new member joins the organisation, they may have not see the level of cohesion of those organisational values. Therefore, an organisation with a strong organisational culture is one in which most of the members of the organisation share similar values and those ones that have made their expectations from their employees clear. (Brown, 1995)
Hofstede (1991) came up with a model that placed organisational culture in a continuum of five major factors i.e.
Long term vs. Short term
Dominant values
Uncertainty avoidance
Power-distance
Individual vs. collectivist
He asserted that organisational culture represents the bargaining ability of a particular group as compared to others. He adds that organisational culture represents the way people have been programmed in a certain environment. Consequently, the underpinning factor within any given culture is the social context where it stems from. In light of these facts, one can say that it is important to manage organisational culture because it allows leaders to balance all the five qualities in such a way as to maximise their potential.
Deal and Kennedy’s views
The two authors asserted that organisational culture is the way things get done within a certain organisation. They looked at organisational culture in terms of two main areas, these are; risk and feedback. Risk was seen as the level of uncertainty in the firm while feedback is the level of response. Using those two elements Deal and Kennedy (1989) were able to come up with four various elements of organisational culture that are each unique to a given example. These four classifications will act as a basis to determine why it is important to merge organisational culture with structure.
The first classification is ‘the Tough guy culture’. Organisations that have adopted such a culture are usually characterised by quick feedbacks and fast rewards too. However, such organisations are