Organizational Culture Homework

Write a half page paper describing your company’s organizational culture. If you are not working now write about a company of organization you were a part of. It could be a church you belong to, your university or a team that you are on or were on.

Use the following ideas to assist you in capturing information about the organizational culture.

1: What ‘things’ would you observe, analyze, study or review to try and understand an organization’s culture? List them.

2: Determine what type of culture the organization has by

A) Determining what represents the culture and the culture’s
distinguishing characteristics and

B) Determine the organization’s culture.

List the characteristics of the culture.

3: Write up a short, ½ to 1 page organizational culture description,

Include what noted differences to the culture may exist.

4: What recommendations can you make to strengthen organizational culture for this organization? Write 3 to 5 recommendations, and why you made those recommendations.

Remember the following:

Levels of Culture and Their Interaction

Level 1. Artifacts and Creations--most visible, its constructed social and physical environment. Includes technology, art, visible and audible behavior patterns (visible but often not decipherable) e.g. written and spoken language, overt behaviors, and how members demonstrate status.

Level 2. Values - Testable in the physical environment; testable only by social consensus (such as taking care of patients). Central values that provide the day-to-day operating principles by which the members of the culture guide their behavior. As values are taken for granted, they gradually become beliefs and assumptions and drop out of consciousness, just as habits become unconscious and automatic.

Level 3. Basic Underlying Assumptions. Relationship to environment; nature of reality, time and space; nature of human nature; nature of human activity; nature of human relationships (taken for granted, invisible, preconscious) the implicit assumptions that tell group members how to perceive, think about, and feel about things. These assumptions are taken for granted; members would find behavior based on any other premise inconceivable.

Thank you....