What is Organizational Culture?

For over a century, culture concept has been central to anthropology and folklore studies for over a century, however enormous body of literature began to flow between 1940s and 1950s whereby treating customs and traditions of work organizations (e.g., Chapple, Dalton, Messenger, Roy & Whyte).

However, only in the early 70s the concept has been from the organizational prospective as known now in our practices as organizational culture, nevertheless, it was not until the 1980s where management scholars widely adopted the culture concept for example; Pascale & Athos (1981), Deal & Kennedy (1982), Ouchi (1981), Kilmann, Saxton, Serpa, & Associates (1985), Peters & Waterman (1982) and Sathe(1985).

Organization culture has been defined by Schein (1987) as the paradigm that created by a group of people in a way to form a standard for both the current and the new employees, in which they can learn how to cope, perceive and think about any upcoming problem. Lord and Maher (1991) argued that organizational members are judging on acts, based on the shared instructions, values, and beliefs which know to form the culture.

While Deal and Kenney (1982) explained that organizational culture is the practice of an organization that leads to the behavior of its member through words, interpersonal relationships and gestures.

Edgar Henry Schein was one of the scholar in this area who produced marvels contribution during the early 80s in the conceptual framework for analyzing and intervening organizational culture which has been inclusive in number of significant researches thereafter such as Pedersen (1991), Pedersen & Sprrensen (1989) and Phillips (1990.

Schein model was basically outlining the framework that explained the complex phenomena by presenting Four processes of manifestation, realization, symbolization, and interpretation. Understand the impact of leader practices on the organization culture would requires the consideration to the driving factor of leader practices and believes.

While it has been noted that organizations differ from their organizational cultures that rely on some practices of symbols, heroes, and rituals (Hofstede et al. 1990). Barkdoll (2006) argued that Leaders intend to change the culture on the way to fit their preferences.