Culture in Organizations
A critical review of theories of the nature of organisational culture, including how it may impact on innovation, and how it may be affected by the leaders of an organisation
Like many other social categories, culture has as many definitions as there are people who tried to describe its meaning and manifestations (Groseschl and Doherty, 2000). Starting from the early definitions, such as “complex whole of knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom and any other capabilities and habits, acquired by a man” (Taylor, 1871, cited by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), culture was always regarded as a sort of “collective programming of the mind that distinguishes people of one group or category from another” (Hofstede, 2001). These wide definitions express not only the difficulty to describing such a broad social category, but also emphasizes on the differences in the research approach, the level at which we explore it, its scope, manifestations, its relations to other social phenomena and etc.
Different assumptions about the nature of organizational culture and approaches to culture research, such like the ones McDonald and Foster (2013) suggest - integration, differentiation and fragmentation, provide different perspectives to studying culture. Rugman at al. (2006) for example suggest studying culture through the knowledge of its nature, elements and scope. The exact elements we take into account, as well as the field we explore, would however lead to different conclusions about its nature, or more specifically, the aspect of its nature that would better fit the concrete research in the wide range of social encounters, culture influences. This shows certain danger of engaging the analysis with the researcher’s own cultural and subcultural perspectives, which undoubtedly has to be avoided.
Terpstra and David (1991) try to stay on the safe side, suggesting language, religion, values, attitudes and ethics to be the main determinants of culture, along with
Like many other social categories, culture has as many definitions as there are people who tried to describe its meaning and manifestations (Groseschl and Doherty, 2000). Starting from the early definitions, such as “complex whole of knowledge, belief, art, law, morals, custom and any other capabilities and habits, acquired by a man” (Taylor, 1871, cited by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), culture was always regarded as a sort of “collective programming of the mind that distinguishes people of one group or category from another” (Hofstede, 2001). These wide definitions express not only the difficulty to describing such a broad social category, but also emphasizes on the differences in the research approach, the level at which we explore it, its scope, manifestations, its relations to other social phenomena and etc.
Different assumptions about the nature of organizational culture and approaches to culture research, such like the ones McDonald and Foster (2013) suggest - integration, differentiation and fragmentation, provide different perspectives to studying culture. Rugman at al. (2006) for example suggest studying culture through the knowledge of its nature, elements and scope. The exact elements we take into account, as well as the field we explore, would however lead to different conclusions about its nature, or more specifically, the aspect of its nature that would better fit the concrete research in the wide range of social encounters, culture influences. This shows certain danger of engaging the analysis with the researcher’s own cultural and subcultural perspectives, which undoubtedly has to be avoided.
Terpstra and David (1991) try to stay on the safe side, suggesting language, religion, values, attitudes and ethics to be the main determinants of culture, along with
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