Functions of organizational culture
Discuss about the Essential Concepts and Applications.
The essay presents a brief overview of the organizational culture. It explains the role and importance of shared organizational culture. In organizational culture, the company shared values, beliefs, and assumption with the employees. The organizational culture provides a good mechanism to the company as well as workers. The essay tells that how resistance to changes affect the business of the company. It explains the various factors which affect the organizational culture. The main object of this study is to determine the relationship between organizational commitment and organizational culture (Littler, 2008).
According to Schein (2010), organizational culture is a system of shared values, beliefs, assumptions, and norms which affect the people thinking, and behavior in the organization. There are four functions of organizational culture, they are discussed as below.
- It provides a sense of identity to employees
- It helps to increase the commitment of people
- It reinforces and emphasizes organization values and norms
- It serves an excellent mechanism for providing shape to the behavior of people.
Organizational culture provides the acceptable and favorable solutions for the problems. Therefore, it promotes a high level of achievement. On the other hands, it explains that organizational culture is an exclusive opinion and perception of an association which has common traits and characteristics.
According to Argote (2012), organizational culture is a set of knowledgeable stable characteristics of an association which demonstrates unique features of an organization. Therefore it differentiates organizational change management from other organizations. It is an important vehicle and medium for implementing organizational change. The organizational change includes the culture, changes, and innovation.
According to O’Connor (2010), organizational culture represents the collective and common values, principles, and beliefs of organizational members. It also includes the norms, beliefs, language, environment, assumptions, location, systems and habits.
There are seven characteristics of organizational culture, they are discussed as below.
Innovation: It is an important significance of organizational culture, therefore, innovation encourages people for doing the work. Innovation improves the performance of employees and it reduces the predictable risk factors.
Emphasis on the outcome: Organizational culture focuses and emphasizes on the outcome and profits of the company. In such way, it plays important role in the association.
Attention to detail: An organizational culture provides high values and attention to detail to the employees to perform the task with good accuracy.
Teamwork: It is an important characteristic of organizational culture because organizational culture provides teamwork to employees. Through teamwork, co-workers and managers maintain good relationship and coordination.
Emphasis on people: Organizational culture emphasizes and encourages people to perform the work. In such way, organizational culture plays a significant role in the achievement of organizational goals and objectives.
Characteristics of organizational culture
Aggressiveness: It is another characteristic of the organizational culture. A shared organization culture can maintain the high values in the organization.
Stability: It is also called as rule oriented culture and it maintains the stability in the culture. It is bureaucratic and predictable in nature.
According to Alvesson & Sveningsson (2015), there are four types of organizational culture, they are discussed as below.
The clan culture: This culture believes in collaboration and teamwork and the employees work together as a family. This culture focuses on the mentoring, development and doing things together. The main values of clan culture are communication, teamwork, and consensus. In this culture, employees build and maintain good relations with the organization.
The adhocracy culture: This culture is based on the creativity and energy. In this culture, the organization encourages and emphasizes employees to reduce various kinds of risk. The core values of adhocracy culture are based on the agility and change.
The market culture: It is the result oriented culture and mainly it focuses on the achievement, competition, and good things. The core values of this culture are profitability and market share.
The hierarchy culture: This culture focuses on the efficiency, doing things right and stability. The core values include uniformity and consistency.
According to Schein (2010), organizational culture plays a significant role in an association. It maintains unity and harmonization among employees. People come from different backgrounds and they follow different culture. So organizational culture provides unity at the workplace and it reduces conflict in the association. Organizational culture provides motivation to employees for doing work, therefore, loyalty and reliability can be maintained by the shared organizational culture. It provides a sense of direction for performing the task at the workplace and organizational culture maintains the good identity and brand image in the market. Now it can be assumed that organizational culture plays an important role for performing the task at the workplace and it provides a good path for the achievement of organizational goals and objectives.
According to O’Connor (2010), there are five factors which affect the organizational culture adversely, they are discussed as below.
Top leadership principles: Leadership principles and norms affect the procedures, policies, rules of the workers and it also affects the business of the company. In such way, it is assumed that all these factors affect the organizational culture.
Nature of business: It has been studied that nature and size of the business also affect the organizational culture adversely (Swayne, Duncan & Ginter, 2012).
Types of organizational culture
Company values, policies, and work ambiance: Companies values, policies and work ambiance also affect the organizational culture.
External parties and clients: The clients and external parties of the company are the part of the company, therefore, they influence the organizational culture directly.
Recruitment and selection: There is no factor is important for culture rather than recruitment and selection factors. These factors largely affect the business of organizational culture.
According to Alvesson & Sveningsson (2015), resistance to change is a touching and behavioral response which affects the work of employees and workers. There are some causes of resistance to change which are discussed as below.
Fear of failure: It is the important cause of resistance to change because sometimes employees afraid and fear about the failure and disappointment and they refuse of the changes. In such way, employees lose their confidence level and they feel alone and disappoint.
Loss of status: Generally managers and employees of the organization always resist the restructure and organizational changes which affect the status of the company as well as employees.
Nonreinforcing reward system: According to Trice & Beyer (1993), non reinforcing is also an important reason for resistance to change. Employees always resist if they do not get rewards for the changing their routine work. Workers expect favorable improvement in their work for accepting numerous changes in the organization culture.
Incongruent group dynamics: The incongruent group dynamics create conflict in employees. It is an important cause of resistance to change in the organizational culture. So the organization should identify these causes and problems.
Breaking routine: It has been analyzed that breaking routine is an important cause of resistance to change in the organizational culture. The employees are the creatures of habits and routines, therefore, they find it very difficult to abandon behavioral practice and routine which the organization does not consider suitable and appropriate. The employees resist the cultural changes and innovation because they think that it requires more time and energy to learn new organizational culture (Eccles, Ioannou & Serafeim, 2012).
According to Jones & Jones (2010), there are some excellent practices which provide support to overcome resistance to change in organizational culture. They are discussed as below.
- The organization should create a way and manner to communicate with workers about innovation and their progress and success. It should update the employees on regular basis and it should give proper instructions to employees towards the organizational culture.
- The company should make the new business strategy to explain the new plans and ideas to the employees. In such way, employees can understand the new strategies, plans, and ideas.
- The organization should invite and encourage the team members and employees to participate in meetings and seminars.
- It should select a group of change managers which provides help to manage the planning, innovation, and implementation.
- An organization should develop and build key deliverables for each and every department and it should also involve the employees in the new business plans and strategies.
It has been analyzed that organizational culture plays a significant role in every company and managers should understand the culture of the organization. They should adopt the innovation and changes in the culture because it improves the quality of workers and it provides help to achieve organizational goals and objectives (Greenhalgh, Robert, Bate, Macfarlane & Kyriakidou, 2008).
The company should develop innovative policies and procedure in the company. In such way, it can maintain an effective organizational culture in the association. The company should perform effectively and adequately with the utilization of available resources. The members of the company should be ready for the changes and innovation. In such way, the company can make a good identity in the market. The employees learn lot of things from innovation and changes so they should enhance and encourage changes and innovation in the organization. For the effective organizational culture, the company should formulate strong business strategies and plans. Now it can be said that every organization should develop a good organizational culture (Jones & Jones, 2010).
References
Argote, L. (2012). Organizational learning: Creating, retaining and transferring knowledge. Springer Science & Business Media.
Eccles, R. G., Ioannou, I., & Serafeim, G. (2012). The impact of a corporate culture of sustainability on corporate behavior and performance (No. W17950). Cambridge, MA, USA: National Bureau of Economic Research.
Greenhalgh, T., Robert, G., Bate, P., Macfarlane, F., & Kyriakidou, O. (2008). Diffusion of innovations in health service organisations: a systematic literature review. John Wiley & Sons.
Greenhalgh, T., Robert, G., Bate, P., Macfarlane, F., & Kyriakidou, O. (2008). Diffusion of innovations in health service organisations: a systematic literature review. John Wiley & Sons.
Jones, G. R., & Jones, G. R. (2010). Organizational theory, design, and change.
O’connor, J. (2010). The cultural and creative industries: a literature review. Creativity, Culture and Eduction.
Rashman, L., Withers, E., & Hartley, J. (2009). Organizational learning and knowledge in public service organizations: A systematic review of the literature. International Journal of Management Reviews, 11(4), 463-494.
Robbins, S. P., DeCenzo, D. A., & Coulter, M. K. (2008). Fundamentals of management: Essential concepts and applications. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational culture and leadership (Vol. 2). John Wiley & Sons.
Swayne, L. E., Duncan, W. J., & Ginter, P. M. (2012). Strategic management of health care organizations. John Wiley & Sons.
Trice, H. M., & Beyer, J. M. (1993). The cultures of work organizations. Prentice-Hall, Inc.
Alvesson, M., & Sveningsson, S. (2015). Changing organizational culture: Cultural change work in progress. Routledge.
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