Organizational Culture
Today business is so different to how it was 20 years ago, with all the changes to the competitive environment and new technologies being developed. Individual consumer has experience much changes in their day to day life, let alone business that provides products and services to meet these individual needed. New technologies were invented every couple of years. Fax, traditional land line telephone will gradually fade out from the main source of communication channels and will soon be replace by Email, Smart Phone, SMS, IP Phone and many more new inventions.
Globalization let businesses exposes itself to the international market but at the same time, businesses are also exposed themselves to other strong competitors who are competing on the same market. To avoid being swallowed by this rapidly change market condition, changes within the organization to improved competitive power is the only choice. Many organizations aware of this needed of changes but failed to act on it, it is not because they don’t know what changes is needed, it is mostly because they fail to understand the core underlying element that effect the outcome – the organizational culture.
Organizational culture is a symbol and pattern that are unique distinguish from one organization to another, it represent the organizational identity. It form the basis for direction on how it members do things, it provides the “meaning” of what we are, where we going and how we are related.
Organizational culture has become so popular in many management literature during the 80’s, wide range of study and research were done and among those, I will rely on Edgar Schein’s recent publication’s definition “the basic tacit assumptions about how the world is and ought to be that a group of people share and that determines their perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and, their overt behavior” (Schein 1996). To break in down into more understandable pieces, Schein has identifies 3 levels of culture...
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