What is culture

What is culture

How and why do we see things in different and/or distinct ways? How do we make meaning with what we see, and how does that affect our actions?
Unit Objectives
Upon successful completion of this unit, the student will be able to:
• Explain the term “Organizational Culture;”
• Compare and contrast the various elements of organizational culture and organizational climate;
• Describe the significance of the relationship between a leader and an organization’s culture; and
• Demonstrate an understanding of basic leadership theories.
Basic Principles
In Edgar Schein’s work, “Organizational Culture and Leadership,” the argument is made that culture is a set of shared behaviors, beliefs, and elements:
• Observed behavioral regularities when people interact: the language they use, the customs and traditions that evolve, and the rituals they employ in a wide variety of situations;
• Group norms: the implicit standards and values that evolve in working groups, such as the particular norm of a “fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay;”
• Espoused values: the articulated, publicly announced principles and values that the group claims to be trying to achieve, such as “product quality” or “price leadership;”
• Formal philosophy: the broad policies and ideological principles that guide a group’s actions toward stockholders, employees, customers, and other stakeholders;
• Rules of the game: the implicit rules for getting along in the organization, “the ropes” that a newcomer must learn to become an accepted member, the “way we do things around here;”
• Climate: the feeling that is conveyed in a group by the physical layout and the way in which members of the organization interact with each other, with customers, or with other outsiders;
• Embedded skills: the special competencies group members display in accomplishing certain tasks, the ability to make certain things that get passed on from generation to generation without necessarily being articulated in writing;
• Habits of thinking, mental models, and/or linguistic paradigms: the shared cognitive frames that guide the perceptions, thought, and language used by the members of a group and are taught to new members in the early socialization process; and
• Shared meanings: the emergent understandings that are created by group members as they interact with each other; and
• “Root metaphors” or integrating symbols: the ideas, feelings, and images groups develop to characterize themselves, that may or may not be appreciated consciously but that become embodied in buildings, office layout, and other material artifacts of the group. This level of the culture reflects group members’ emotional and aesthetic responses as contrasted with their cognitive or evaluative response.
Schein (p. 26-27):
Though the essence of a group’s culture is its pattern of shared, taken-for-granted basic assumptions, the culture will manifest itself at the levels of observable artifacts and shared espoused values, norms, and rules of behavior. It is important to recognize in analyzing cultures that artifacts are easy to observe but difficult to decipher and that values may only reflect rationalizations or aspirations. To understand a group’s culture, one must attempt to get at its shared basic assumptions and one must understand the learning process by which such basic assumptions come to be.
Part A Reading Assignments
Read Schein, Chapters 1-5, 8 and 10.
Schein, Edgar H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership. 4th ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. Publishers. ISBN-10: 0470185864, ISBN-13: 978-0470185865.
Required Work
UNIT ONE ASSIGNMENT: WEB ANNOTATIONS
Find 5 web sites that relate to the unit topic(s). For each web site, begin with a proper APA-style reference entry. Then, write a three-paragraph critical annotation. Note, your description should be critical. Ask and answer: Who is posting this information? What are they saying? What are the inherent biases here, and can this source be trusted? When grading this assignment I’ll look for the following in each entry:
(1) applicability to the assigned topic
(2) a full, two paragraph-long description of the site content
(3) critical evaluation of the posting source, content, and inherent bias
(4) clean, clear writing
(5) an APA-style reference entry.
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