Hi welcome! Today I’d like to talk to you about organizational culture.

When we think
about culture, we often talk about the glue that holds and organization together. But what
does that really mean? There are three levels of organizational culture according to Schein.
I’d like to show you these three levels, and how they relate to, of all thing, and iceberg. So,
an iceberg, underneath the water is actually much bigger than what we see. What we see
when we think about organizational culture, are we consider the organizations artifacts.
When we walk into an office environment, artifacts are those symbols, those
representations of the organization, and what they stand for. People wearing gear, proud of
who they are and what they stand for. Part of those artifacts are also the way people say
things, and speak about the organization. So, it’s what we see, what we hear, and what we
feel, when we walk into an organization, or surrounded by an organization. Sometimes it’s
easy to identify, but difficult to understand. When we think about how we get to the point
of what our artifacts are, we actually have two levels within our iceberg. First here, we have
the organization’s values and beliefs. And below the values and beliefs, we have these
underlying assumptions. Now, values and beliefs can be as simple as the organizations
mission statement, value statement s to who they are, and beliefs around the organization
as to why they do what they do. When you look at the underlying assumption, it’s harder to
put a finger on what those are, and where they come from. It’s those perceptions and ways
an organization does things we actually don’t even, maybe sometimes don’t even know
why. Sometimes the organizational culture is that they don’t just work on Saturday’s,
because we just do, or because they just do, and no one’s really stopped to think about:
“Why? Does it make sense? Does it tie to our values, beliefs and who we are as an
organization?” So, we have what we see, we have what we can’t see, and when we consider
these values and beliefs sometimes it can be a bit of an organizational tension. Because the
values and beliefs that are on paper could be very different than the culture, once you’re
within an organization. So, when we look at organizational culture, there’s often a much
bigger, underlying
background as to how the organization got to where we are. So, there we are, three levels
of organizational culture are: Artifacts, our Values and Beliefs, and our Underlying
Assumptions. English Up next