ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
Organizational culture refers to “the values, norms, beliefs, and practices that govern how an institution functions. At the most basic level, organizational culture defines the assumptions that employees make as they carry out their work” [CAIB, 2003]. It is these assumptions that often influence the decisions made by employees. Why do organizations put their employees in awkward or difficult situations that can yield negative results? In many cases it relates to the diversity of the organization’s goals and how they create incompatibilities in what employees need to be accomplishing.
Some organizations pass goal conflicts on to individual practitioners quite openly, but many are never made explicit [Dekker, 2005]. Rather, these conflicts are left to emerge from multiple irreconcilable expectations from different levels and sources or from both subtle and tacit pressures. Another factor is management or customer reactions to past trade-offs [Woods et al., 2010).
Stewart wrote that there are four categories of causal factors that can affect the culture of an organization:
1. Philosophy and Values – Organizational mission, employee involvement, and customer service orientation.
2. Supervisory / Leadership Skills – Quality of communications, distribution of influence, sources of power, goal setting, and facilitation.
3.Human
Resources Management–
Selection & placement, training & development, respect, empowerment, and appraisals & reinforcement. 4. Job Design – Autonomy, variety, feedback, task identity, significance, and interdependence.
There are several overlaps in the provided set of causal factors, but one common thread of them all is the skills of the supervisory/ leadership team. It is important that employees see management actions reinforcing the value system, not contradicting it [CNSC, 2002]. A key focus of training should be to develop proper attitudes, values, and beliefs in leaders and others. Values can either be terminal: saying what we have to do, or a value can be instrumental: telling us how we should do something [Rokeach, 1973].
A common viewpoint of cultural values as described by C. Dominick Guess considers the difference of individualism and collectivism. Individualistic cultures are defined by detachment from relationships and community. The individual views himself or
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herself as relatively independent from others. In contrast, collectivist cultures stress the importance of relationships, roles, and status within the social system. Individualistic values and collectivist values influence individuals’ decision- making in three ways:
1. The perception of the problem.
2. The generation of strategies and alternatives. 3. The selection of one alternative.
Cultural expectations and values are represented in the individual’s mind and may act as guiding principles for the selection of specific dynamic decision- making strategies. Values tell us what broad decision-making strategy we should follow, and why we should follow it [Guess, 2004].
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