Organizational Culture Is The Most Important Variable That Influences The Organizational Performance

“Culture consists of the symbols, rituals, language, and social dramas that highlight organizational life, including myths, stories, and jargon. It includes the shared meanings associated with the symbols, rituals, and language. Culture combines the philosophy of the firm with beliefs, expectations, and values shared by members. It contains the stories and myths about the company's founder and its current leading figures. Organizational culture consists of a set of shared meanings and values held by a set of members in an organization that distinguish the organization from other organizations. An organization's culture determines how it perceives and reacts to the larger environment (Becker, 1982; Schein, 1996). Culture determines the nature

Internally, organizational culture, a set of important assumptions that members of an organization share in common, should be established to provide meaning, direction, and a basis for action (Pearce & Robinson, 2004). The organization would benefit if leaders promote and identify key themes and dominant values within the organization to reinforce competitive advantage they seek to maintain and build (Pearce & Robinson, 2004).

Organizational culture is not a new concept in the world of organizational behavior. Yet despite its age, it still has many varied definitions as well as philosophies on its importance and impact to the success of a company. One definition is that organizational culture is a cognitive framework consisting of attitudes, values, behavioral norms, and expectations shared by members of an organization (Greenberg, 2013, p. 368). Greenberg (2013) further explains organizational culture through an analogy of a tree. Organizational culture are similar to the roots of a tree.

Culture can be defined as a set of shared values, shared beliefs and customary ways of thinking doing things, which shape and guides the ways of organisational members. Culture is therefore very crucial as it has the ability to influence the processes or the activities of employees and the functioning of the organisation without necessarily imposing measures and control.

Organizational culture is the personality of the organization. Culture is comprised of the assumptions, values, norms and tangible signs (artifacts) of organization members and their behaviors. Members of an organization soon come to sense the particular culture of an organization. Culture is one of those terms that are difficult to express distinctly, but everyone knows it when they sense it. For example, the culture of a large, for-profit corporation is quite different than that of a hospital which is quite different that that of a university. You can tell the culture of an organization by looking at the arrangement of furniture, what they brag about, what members wear.

Culture is the collective attitude, intellect, and atmosphere that a community creates for itself. This includes values, traditions, and social norms. Specifically, organizational culture is within a community, group, or business that shares values, follows a code of conduct and standards, and holds its members accountable for their contributions. Organizational culture arises from the goals and mission set out by the company. A negligent culture can provoke and encourage inappropriate behavior between employees. As shown with Uber, organizational culture can become dangerous and harmful to its members if proper standards are not established.

Organizational culture is a term widely used but one that seems to give rise to a degree of ambiguity in terms of assessing its effectiveness on change variables at a work place or in an Organization. Organizational culture at any organization is defined as “ A system of shared meaning held

Organizational culture is a way to describe the collective behavior within an organization, the values, norms, language, symbols, status, and beliefs and habits. We can also view organizational behavior as the collection of behaviors within an organization that cause those members to perceive their organization and others. In fact, organizational culture affects the way individuals and groups interact with each other, clients, stakeholders and the public. Because people are so individualistic, it would stand to reason that each organization would have a unique culture, or even group of cultures based on location or department/focus.

Organizational Cultures : We know that organizational cultures is the collection of shared beliefs, values, rituals, stories, myths, and specialized language that foster a feeling of community among organization members. Cultures based largely on taken granted factors which exerts a powerful influence on

The organization culture as a leadership concept has been identified as one of the many components that leaders can use to grow a dynamic organization. Leadership in organizations starts the culture formation process by imposing their assumptions and expectations on their followers. Once culture is established and accepted, they become a strong leadership tool to communicate the leader 's beliefs and values to organizational members, and especially new comers. When leaders promote ethical culture, they become successful in maintaining organizational growth, the good services demanded by the society, the ability to address problems before they become disasters and consequently are competitive against rivals. The leader 's success will depend to a large extent, on his knowledge and understanding of the organizational culture. The leader who understands his organizational culture and takes it seriously is capable of predicting the outcome of his decisions in preventing any anticipated consequences. What then is organizational culture? The concept of organizational culture has been defined from many perspectives in the literature. There is no one single definition for organizational culture. The topic of organizational culture has been studied from many perspectives and disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, organizational behavior, and organizational leadership to name a few. Deal defines organizational culture as values,

Organizational culture is defined by its values, leadership style, language, and routines that identifies and make the organization set apart from others. The culture of an organization is the mindset of the organization. The culture of an organization is displayed by the behavior and mindset of the people within the organization and the structured performance, systems, and technologies of the organization (Anderson & Anderson, 2010).

An organisation’s culture can be described as a collection shared experiences over time, by resolution of problems faced in both an external and internal environment (Schein 1990, p.1100). Although, organisational culture is considered a modern concept, a historical viewpoint is explored, to provide evidence of the long held value of this concept to communities, . Furthermore, the formational factors, processes and drivers that develop culture in an organisation, whether positive or negative, will be explored.

To define organizational culture we must first understand what a culture is in relation to an organization. Culture can be defined as the acquisition of knowledge that individuals may use to try to interpret experiences and facilitate a social behavior that is appropriate (Deem, DeLotell & Kelly, 2015). Eaton & Kilby (2015) examines culture as an entity that is always with us, it is all around us. It is created and expanded by our constant interactions with others.

Interest in the area of corporate culture is said to have originated in the 1970s as a response to the success of Japanese management and the perceived failure of traditional organizational analysis (Hofstede, Neuijen, Ohayv & Sanders, 1990; Ouchi, 1985; Martin & Frost, 1999). Since then, research has flourished, with particular emphasis placed on the link between culture and corporate performance (Kilmann, Saxton & Serpa, 1985). Observations of the most well-known, best run companies, like IBM and Google, seem to suggest that having a unique, cohesive culture can propel a company above the competition (Kilmann et al., 1985). Following from this, it makes sense that figuring out how to control culture to achieve competitive advantage has received a lot of attention from scholars and management alike (Anthony, 1994).

An organization is an entity comprising multiple people, such as an institution or association and is linked to an external environment. Culture is a way of life of people - the values, beliefs, behaviors and symbols they accept and practice and pass from one generation to another. Organizational culture therefore is a system of values, beliefs, behaviors and symbols that governs how people should behave in organizations. This is a relatively stable element of an organization that greatly influences its members or employees on how they should act within the organization - work ethics, habits, skilss, even up to dress codes.