Introduction
Organizational Culture is the most recent method of studying companies and other organizations, but there have always been studies of such groups, in an effort to determine how and why they succeed/or don't.
As people work together to accomplish goals, groups develop into organizations. As goals become more specific and longer-term, and work more specialized, organizations become both more formal and institutionalized. Organizations tend to take on a life of their own and widely held beliefs, values, and practices develop, differentiating one organization from another and often affecting the organization's success or failure. In the early 1980s, management scholars began attempting to describe these belief systems, which they referred to as organizational or corporate cultures.
An organizational culture is defined as the shared assumptions, values, and beliefs that guide the actions of its members. Organizational culture tends to be shaped by the founders' values, the industry and business environment, the national culture, and the senior leaders' vision and behavior. There are many dimensions or characteristics of organizational culture that have been defined. For example, a research study conducted by J.A. Chatman and K.A. Jehn in 1994, identified seven primary characteristics that define an organization's culture: innovation, stability (maintaining the status quo versus growth), people orientation, outcome orientation, easygoingness, detail orientation, and team orientation.
Large organizations usually have a dominant culture that is shared by the majority of the organization and subcultures represented by groups of individuals with unique values or beliefs that may or may not be consistent with the dominant culture. Subcultures that reject the dominant culture are called countercultures. Strong organizational cultures are those where the core values of the dominant culture are strongly believed by the great majority of...