Leadership and Org Culture

Abstract

Culture permeates all aspects of any society. It acts as the basic fabric that binds people together. Culture dictates tastes in music, clothes, and even the political and philosophical views of a group of people. Culture is not only shared, but it is deep and stable. However, culture does not exist simply as a societal phenomenon. Organizations, both large and small, adhere to a culture. Organizational culture determines how an organization operates and how its members frame events both inside and outside the organization. This paper explores the basic concepts of organizational culture. It describes what organizational culture is, its importance, how it is formed, various types of organizational cultures that exist and the role of leaders in influencing the organization culture.

Organizational Culture

A plethora of definitions exist for organizational culture. Various scholars define culture as how an organization goes about meeting its goals and missions, how an organization solves problems, or as a deeply rooted value that shapes the behavior of the individuals within the group. In reality organizational culture is all of these things. In its entirety organizational culture consists of an organization's shared values, symbols, behaviors, and assumptions. From an organizational perspective, the collective values and beliefs of the individual members of that organization represent a phenomenon called, "organizational culture". It constitutes a pattern of basic assumptions held by the people in the organization that it uses to address its problem of adaptation and integration (Schein and Edgar, 1990)/ Xenikou and Furnham (Xenikou, Anthena and Adrian Furnham, 1996) identified a number of factors related to organizational culture. Four of these factors