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Organizational culture has been linked to economic performance and organization viability/success (Denison & Mishra, 1995; Han, Kim & Srivastava, 1998; Higgins, 1995; Smith, 1998). For example, organizations dedicated to continuous improvement, with visionary leaders who 'walk their talk' and focus on a set of core values, have been shown to be more financially successful in the long-term (cf. Collins & Porras, 1998; Kotter & Heskett, 1992). Organizational culture has also been shown to be important for successful new product/process innovation and organizational change (Bahrami, 1992; Claver et al., 1998; Smith, 1998; Umiker, 1999). People are constantly surrounded by culture. It forms the background (often invisible) of our work-lives, coloring everything in an organization. Organizational culture also provides a powerful mechanism for controlling behavior by influencing how we attach meaning to our world and how we interpret events. Organizational culture is the collection of norms, values, beliefs, expectations, assumptions, and philosophy of the people within it. Different organizations, and different parts of the same organization, use diverse jargon, participate in various rituals, and use a number of different artifacts. For example, merchant bankers, as compared to medical practitioners or school teachers for example, would have a jargon all their own and would use certain analysis tools and techniques vastly dissimilar to the language and tools used by doctors or teachers. Even within the same organisation, there would be distinct sub-cultures. We would expect people in and engineering or IT department to have a distinctly different culture from those in the accounting or HR areas. There are many ways to visualize the concept of organizational culture. One popular conceptualization is the onion model. If you cut an onion in half and look at it, you will see many layers. An organization's culture can be visually represented in this way (as illustrated in Figure 1).
Figure 1. The onion model of organizational culture. When we walk around an organization, there are elements of the organization's culture that are 'on the surface' and are relatively easily visible. We can see many cultural symbols (e.g., whether your office is on a floor close to the top or the bottom of the building, how big your office is), artifacts (e.g., computers), and patterns of behavior (e.g., how and where people interact, how they behave in formal and informal meetings). Less visible, but equally important, are the less visible aspects of culture such as the norms, values and basic assumptions people make. Another way of conceptualizing organizational culture is in terms of its 'hard' and its 'soft' sides. As we see in Figure 2, organizational culture is 'supported' by both social/psychological aspects (e.g., stories, symbols, rituals) and by some more concrete elements such as power structures, hierarchical structure and control systems (e.g., financial, measurement and reward systems).
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