Management - Vikhansky OS

1.2. The content of organizational culture

There are many approaches to the allocation of the various attributes characterizing and identifying a particular culture at both the macro and micro levels. Thus, F. Harris and R. Moran (1991) propose to consider the specific organizational culture based on the ten characteristics [5]:

• awareness of themselves and their place in the organization (some cultures value the concealment of their internal employee sentiment, others - encourage their external manifestation, in some cases, independence and creativity is manifested through cooperation, and in others - through individualism);

• communication system and the language of communication (using oral, written, non-verbal communication, "telephone law" and openness of communication varies from group to group, from organization to organization, jargon, acronyms, gestures vary by industry, functional and territorial organization affiliation) ;

• appearance, dress and presentation at work (a variety of uniforms and workwear, business style, cleanliness, cosmetics, hair, etc. confirm the presence of many microcultures);

• what and how people eat, habits and traditions in this area (catering workers, including the presence or absence of those places in the enterprise; people bring their own food or visit the coffee shop inside or outside the organization, grant power, frequency and duration of power; eating there workers of different levels together or separately, etc.);

• Time awareness, attitude and its use (degree of accuracy and relativity of time for workers; compliance with the interim order and the promotion of it; monohronicheskoe or polihronicheskoe use of time);

relationships between people (by age and gender, status and power, wisdom and intellect, experience and knowledge, rank and protocol, religion and nationality, etc .; the degree of formalization of the relations of support received, the path of conflict resolution);

values (as a set of guidelines that is good and what is bad) and norms (as a set of assumptions and expectations of a certain type of behavior) - that people value in their organizational life (its position, titles, or the work itself, and so on. n), and these values ​​are stored.;

• belief in something and the attitude or disposition to something (a belief in leadership, success in the forces, in Peer, in ethical behavior, fairness, etc .; attitude to colleagues, to customers and competitors, to evil and violence, aggression, etc .; the influence of religion and morality);

• the development of the employee and learning (thoughtless or deliberate execution of the work; rely on intelligence or force; procedures for informing workers; the recognition or denial of the primacy of logic in the reasoning and actions; abstraction and conceptualization in thinking or memorizing; approaches to the explanation of the reasons);

work ethic and motivation (related to the work and responsibilities at work, separation and replacement work, the purity of the workplace, the quality of work; habits at work, evaluation of work and remuneration, the relationship "man - machine", individual or group work, promotion at work ).

The above-mentioned characteristics of the culture of the organization, taken together, reflect and give meaning to the concept of organizational culture. Help in understanding this concept can have a model [13] The relationship between the content of organizational culture and its manifestation and perception and interpretation of cultural workers (Fig. 10.3).

Members of the organization, sharing faith and expectations, create their physical environment, develop the language of communication, perform adequately perceived by other actions and exhibit understood by all the feelings and emotions. All this is being perceived by employees, helping them to understand and interpret the culture of the organization, ie, give its value events and actions and make meaningful their work environment. The behavior of individuals and groups within the organization strongly associated norms arising from these shared beliefs, expectations and actions.

The content of organizational culture relations

Fig. 10.3. The content of the organizational culture of relations (for B. CdTe)

The content of organizational culture influences the orientation and behavior is not determined by the simple sum of the assumptions and the way they relate to each other and how they form certain patterns of behavior. A distinctive feature of this or that culture is relative order, which houses forming its basic assumptions, indicating which policy and what principles should prevail in the event of a conflict between different sets of assumptions. So, the two companies can equally claim as one of its values ​​on the development of cooperation and competition in the internal work. However, one company co-operation will have more to do with decision-making process, and internal competition - to career planning. In other company accents can be placed in reverse order. Cultures of these two organizations are sufficiently different in content, despite the fact that the set of assumptions is essentially the same.

once again it demonstrates that talk about the organizational culture as a monolithic phenomenon is not necessary given above. This is only one culture in the organization. However, you must understand that in one organization there can be many "local" cultures. This refers to a prevailing culture throughout the organization and culture of its parts (levels, departments, professional, regional, national, age, sex and other groups). These different sub-cultures can co-exist under the roof of one common culture.

One or several subcultures in the organization can by nature be in the same dimension as the dominant culture in the organization, or create a second dimension to it. In the first case it will be a kind of enclave in which the commitment to the core values ​​of the dominant culture manifests itself to a greater extent than in other parts of the organization. This is usually the case with a subculture of the central apparatus of any organization or government system. In the second case, the key values ​​of the dominant culture in the organization are accepted members of any of its groups simultaneously with a separate set of other, often non-conflicting values ​​for themselves. This can be observed on the periphery of the organization or in the territorial administration. In this way, it can be a tool to the specific activity (functional services) or local conditions (territorial offices).

Similar to what occurs in society, organizations may exist a third type of subcultures that hard enough to reject what the organization wants to achieve as a whole. The following types can be distinguished among these organizational countercultures: (1) direct opposition to the values of the dominant organizational culture; (2) opposition to the power structure within the organization of the dominant culture; (3) Opposition to the patterns of relations and interactions that are supported by the dominant culture. Counterculture in the organization usually appear when individuals or groups are in an environment that they feel they can not provide the usual or desired satisfaction. In a sense, organizational counterculture is a call for help in times of stress or crisis, that is, when the existing support system has collapsed and people are trying to recover at least some control over his life in the organization. Some of the "counterculture" groups can be quite influential in the course of large-scale transformations, associated with significant changes in the nature, structure and nature of the organization. Illustrative examples of such groups were all-powerful in his time councils of labor collectives, appearing today in the course of privatization of the group of owners of a controlling stake of enterprises and business units of budgetary organizations.