Understanding and Developing Organizational Culture, Essay Example

Chapter 12 talks about the importance of organizational culture. Indeed, in the case studies, it is evident that the companies created a culture that employees and customers could relate to. The definition of organizational culture, used by the chapter also emphasizes that it is “shared social knowledge within an organization”, meaning that it is aligned with the values and visions of all stakeholders.

Organizational culture has several constituents: observation artifacts, symbols, language, rituals, ceremonies, and stories. These components are all present to create a shared system of values and view within the organization. The more connected employees feel with these components the higher their commitment will be.

The core of an organization culture lies in the basic underlying assumptions. These are described as “taken for granted beliefs”. The authors of the chapter feature some values that are shared within UPS, such as promoting from within the organization, or building the organization around people. In a busy restaurant, however, one of the assumptions would be to provide on the job training automatically to new employees, and senior service staff would automatically volunteer to provide guidance and training.

Organizational cultures have two dimensions, represented in Table 12-2: solidarity and sociability. High sociability and high solidarity organizations are called networked organizations.  They are the most effective, as they create a strong common vision and embrace open communication.

The two main types of culture that today’s organizations adapt are customer service culture and diversity culture. Both of the models have several benefits for the company. A customer service culture focuses on serving clients to their greatest satisfaction, therefore, it is able to improve the reputation of the company among customers. However, a diversity culture focuses on employee relationships and takes advantage of the diversity of employees. While recognizing and embracing employee diversity is an ethical requirement for all organizations, and customer service culture is in the best interest of the management, when the company only focuses on one area of relationships (customers or employees), it cannot fully succeed. If employees are not supported and trained by the company, and diverse workers are not given career development opportunities, their motivation and customer service will become affected.

Strong culture of organizations has benefits and disadvantages alike. This is the statement that is the most surprising in this chapter. The common assumption is that a strong culture would evidently be beneficial, however, it does negatively affect diversity at the workplace.

The main takeaway from this chapter is that the relationship (fit) between the person and the organization has a weak impact on job performance, while a strong impact on organizational commitment. It is evident that today’s organizations need to find a balance between promoting culture and embracing diversity to succeed in the competitive global market.