Culture

Elements of Organizational Culture

Physical Structures
Artifacts of Rituals/ Ceremonies
Organizational Stories
Culture Language

Organizational
Culture
Artifacts: Organizational Stories
• Social prescriptions of desired behavior
• Demonstrate that organizational objectives are
attainable
• Most effective stories:
• Describe real people
• Assumed to be true
• Known throughout the organization
• Are prescriptive
Artifacts: Rituals and Ceremonies
• Rituals
• programmed routines
• e.g., conducting meetings, employee forums, x-mas parties
• Ceremonies
• planned activities for an audience
• e.g., award ceremonies
• Heroes
• Figure who exemplifies character and deed
• E.g. founders as Tom Watson of IBM, Bill Gates of Microsoft
 Artifacts: Organizational Language

• Words used to address people, describe clients, etc.

• e.g. sir/ma’am, first name calling
• Leaders use phrases and metaphors as cultural symbols
• e.g.. General Electric’s “grocery store”
• Language also found in subcultures
• e.g.. Whirlpool’s “PowerPoint culture”
• Slogans
• E.g. Nokia Connecting People
 Stories
Stories Rituals
Rituals

How
How Employees
Employees
Learn
Learn Culture/
Culture/
How
How it
it is
is “reinforced”
“reinforced”

Material
Material
Language
Language
Symbols
Symbols
Benefits of Strong Corporate Cultures

Social
Control

Strong
Organizational Social
Culture Glue

Aids
Sense-Making
Studies show that culture is closely related to
the effectiveness of organizations.
Model of Organizational Culture Types
Four Culture Types
Studies on Culture Types
• Deshpande, Farley, and Webster (1993) found that competing values
of the market culture outperform those of the clan culture.
• Those of the adhocracy culture outperformed those of the diagonally
opposing hierarchy culture.
• The speed of response to environmental changes which determine a
higher performance is thus culturally dependent.