Organizations have personalities, just like individuals. They can be strict or flexible, unfriendly or supportive, innovative or conservative.
The understanding of what makes up an organization’s culture and how it is created, sustained, and learned will enhance the ability to explain and predict the behavior of people at work.
Culture is what a group learns over a period of time as that group solves its problems of survival in an external environment and its problems of internal integration. Schein (1990) defined culture as a pattern of basic assumptions, invented, discovered, or developed by a given group, as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore is to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to those problems.
Becker (1982) agreed that organizational culture refers to a system of shared meaning held by members that distinguishes the organization from other organizations. It conveys a sense of identity for the members, and generates commitment and individual’s self interest.
O’riely et al‘s (1994) research suggested that there are seven primary characteristics that capture the essence of an organizations culture: Innovation and risk taking, attention to detail, outcome orientation, people orientation, team orientation, aggressiveness and stability. These characteristics appraise the organization a give a composite picture of its culture.
Strong cultures have a greater impact on employee behavior and more directly related to reduce turnover. A strong culture’s values are intensely held and widely shared; it has a great influence on the behavior of its members because the high degree of intensity created an internal climate of high behavioral control. One specific result of strong culture should be lower turn over. A strong culture demonstrates high agreement among members about what builds cohesiveness, loyalty and organizational commitment. These qualities, in turn, lessen employees’ propensity to leave the organization. Part of creating a positive culture is articulating praise, failing to praise can become a silent killer, because employees don’t usually ask for it, and managers don’t realize the cost of failing to do it (Robbins & Judge 2009).
Denison & Mishra (1995) explored the relationship between organizational culture and effectiveness. Providing evidence for the existence of four cultural traits, involvement, consistency, adaptability and mission, and imply that these characteristics are positively related to perceptions of performance. Culture can be studied, as an integral part of the adaptation process of organizations and specific culture traits may be useful predictors of performance and effectiveness.
High levels of involvement and participation create a sense of ownership and responsibility; this ownership leads to organizational commitment and growing capacity and increasing quality of decision-making and autonomy.
Implicit control systems, based upon internalized values, can be a more effective means of achieving coordination and integration than external control systems relying on explicit rules and regulations.
Adaptability asserts that an effective organization must develop norms and beliefs that support its capacity to receive and interpret signals from its environment and translate these into internal cognitive, behavioral and constructive changes.
A sense of mission provides two major influences on an organizations functioning, first, a mission provides purpose and meaning, and a host of noneconomic reasons why the organizations work is so