Essay on Organization Culture for week 7

Work from Lecture 4 – Organization Culture

Introduction

Gareth Morgan (1986) raised the concept of culture metaphor, which simply elaborate the covert of the Organizational Cultural Iceberg. Organization can be a more complicated concept than it seems to be. It can be too rational or abstract without interpretations. Hence, in order to give people a vivid view of traditional concept of organization, Morgan has developed eight metaphors of organization, among which he interprets organizations as cultures.

Strengths of Culture Metaphor

It is easy to believe that almost all the organization get their different values resulting from their different goals. But for many organizations they have much in common. For example, some organization believes in competitive and ambiguous attitude, therefore, the culture in this kind of organization tending to be tensive. While some other organizations take much more consideration in the right people making their own decisions. However, all these same or different points related to organization cannot be easily found out in the rational routine activities, they are more often shown up in every details in the daily functions reflecting a kind of culture of the whole organization or part of it, which are much more close to the life. As Morgan raised in his book(Images of Oraganization P135), “ One of the major strengths of the culture metaphor rests in the fact that it directs attention to the symbolic or even “magical” significance of even the most rational aspects of organizational life.” Analyzing the culture of one organization often give a view of the whole environments both inside and outside this organization which making the “organization machine” more humanistic.

Effect of Organization of Organization Structure

Organization culture can be defined in different ways. However, most of the definitions have the common aspect that organization culture can be a functional part which would make the employees would blend into the organizations regarding the values, beliefs, property rights and structures in the whole organization.(Gareth Jones1986, Pettigrew1979, Siehl and Mrtin1984 Mary Jo Hathch 2006 ) Hence, organization culture cannot be the same, it varies from organization to organization because organizations operate in different ways, for example, the organization culture can be totally different for Mechanistic Structure(MS) and Organic Structure(OS): the MS may be more competitive and intensely paying more attention to its top management while the OS might be take much notice of the own thoughts of its employees, but this is not always the truth. Consequently, organization culture and organization structure can be mutually effected.

Handy (1993) Mclean, A. and Marshall, J.(1988) and Mullin (P742) states that there are many key factors that may influence the development of the organization culture as well as structure such as history, primary function and technology, strategy, size location management and leadership and the environment. Almost certainly, different types of corporate culture may result in different structure forming of a organization, conversely the same. The problem is when take all the above decisive elements into consideration, what stereotype of an organization would be like.

Appropriate organization culture would have a good influence on the development of the organization forming its structure. For example, power culture, which is suitable for setting up the Simple Structure for an organization, tends to supervise the whole organization directly by a central power of the top management selected. This centralized structure requires a small-sized entrepreneur with a relative stable history, for instance, a company without any merging problems would gain a relative consistent culture. Meantime a simple and dynamic environment could keep the organization operate effectively. Another example is if