Thursday, August 28, 2008 Cortez: A Look at Organization Culture By Jaime V. Cortez Business Academy
MR. CRUZ, an employee of above-average personal and professional qualifications, performed poorly in Organization A. Transferring to Organization B, he was pronounced as the "best employee of the year" during the company's employee recognition program.
Mr. Santos, a manager, led Organization C to unprecedented heights of success during his watch. Moving to Organization D, he was branded as one of the company's most ineffective leaders.
While there may be many possible reasons for these phenomena, one possible explanation might be "person-organization fit."
There might be some things in Mr. Cruz and Mr. Santos's values and behavior that made them fit to one organizational culture and unfit for another one.
But what is organizational culture? Organizational culture is a system of shared meaning held by members that distinguishes one organization from other organizations. It is what O'Reilly, Chatman and Caldwell (1991) suggested as being described by seven primary characteristics, namely:
1. Innovation and risk-taking: the degree to which employees are encouraged to explore something new and take chances to succeed or to fail;
2. Attention to detail: the degree of emphasis to precision, analysis and minute matters;
3. Outcome orientation: the emphasis on results rather than on the techniques and processes used to produce these results;
4. People orientation: the emphasis management places on the effect of outcomes to people within the organization;
5. Team orientation: the emphasis on collectivism versus individualism;
6. Aggressiveness: the emphasis on being competitive rather than easygoing; and
7. Stability: the emphasis on maintaining the status quo versus pursuing growth.
No organization always exhibits these characteristics to the extreme (that is, very high or very low).
Most organizations would, in fact, manifest these qualities to a certain degree between high and low.
Do all members in organizations share the same culture? Mostly, but not necessarily all, will subscribe to the dominant organizational culture.
As always, there will always be subcultures within the larger culture, such as those of individuals in the Marketing Department, the Production/Operations Department, the Finance Department and the Human Resource Management Department.
Accountants may be comfortable dealing with each other under a given subculture, just as engineers, lawyers, nurses, kitchen crew, carpenters, machinists and janitors would be happy treating peers following another subculture.
This, not to mention the fact, that there might also be isolated cases of individual deviations from the organizational culture, as shown by people who can't and don't act according to the established norm.
Organizational culture is a fact of work life. The gist is that individual behavior at work should not be looked at in isolation but in the context by which it is performed.
Very important as a context is "organizational culture" - that complex whole that serves as "social glue defining the appropriate standards of what organizational members should say or do."
*Dr. Jaime V. Cortez is currently Research and Planning Director and Graduate School professor at Holy Angel University, Angeles City. He can be reached at profcortez@yahoo.com.
