Culture consists of beliefs and behavior. It is cultivated behavior in the sense that it is learnt from the other members of the society.
According to Henry Mintzberg, an internationally renowned author on Business and Management, “culture is the soul of the organization – the beliefs and values, and how they are manifested. I think of the structure as the skeleton, and as the flesh and blood. And culture is the soul that holds the thing together and gives it life force.” These lines portray how critical is a culture in an organization.Some theorists looked upon organizations as having many of the features of cultures (Brown, 1995).
Martins and Martins (2003) defined organizational culture as “a system of shared meaning held by members, distinguishing the organization from other organizations”. Arnold (2005) indicated “that organizational culture is the distinctive norms, beliefs, principles and ways of behaving that combine to give each organization its distinct character”. These two definitions suggest that organizational culture distinguishes one organization from another.According to Brown (1998), organizational culture is “the pattern of beliefs, values and learned ways of coping with experience that have developed during the course of an organization’s history, and which tend to be manifested in its material arrangements and in the behaviors of its members”.
Due to this, organizational culture is articulated in the organization in order to shape the way in which its members should behave. In the same way, Harrison (1993) defined organizational culture as the “distinctive constellation of beliefs, values, work styles, and relationships that distinguish one organization from another”. In other words, organizational culture includes those qualities of the organization that give it a particular climate or feel.The distinct qualities of an organization may manifest through four dimensions of culture. Charles Handy, in his seminal work Understanding Organizations, defined the four separate organizational culture types as follows: The Power culture is based on inequality of access to resources. It has a single source of power from which rays of influence spread throughout the organization.
This means that power is centralized to a few people and organizational members are connected to the center by functional and specialist strings. Control radiates from the center like a web. Organizations with centralized decision-making fall under this category. The Role culture has defined authority in highly bureaucratic and structured organization.In a Role Culture, people have clearly delegated authorities within a highly defined structure. Power derives from a person's position and little scope exists for expert power.
It focuses mainly on job description and specialization. In other words, work is controlled by procedures and rules that underlie the job description, which is more important than the person who fills the position. In the Task culture, teams are formed to solve particular problems which results in a network forming a matrix organization. Power and authority of task is distributed to the right person with the right expertise. This culture is highly performance orientated where the personal goals tend to synchronize with the organizational goals. A Person Culture exists where all individuals believe themselves superior to the organization.
Survival can become difficult for such organizations, since the concept of an organization suggests that a group of like-minded individuals pursue the organizational goals and come together as one for a purpose. Some professional partnerships can operate as person cultures, because each partner brings a particular expertise and clientele to the organization.The role of organizational culture is crucial to understanding organizational behavior. According to Wagner (1995), organizational culture has a strong influence on employees’ behavior and attitudes. It stresses on sharing of norms and values that guide the organizational members' behavior and “involves standards and norms that prescribe how employees should behave in any given organization” (Martins and Martins, 2003).
Therefore, managers and employees do not behave in a value-free vacuum; they are governed, directed and tempered by the organization’s culture (Brown, 1998). Employees’ behavior includes their commitment to their respective organizations. For example, if the culture encourages innovativeness, any problem will make people take initiative and risks as well as try out new ways of doing things. On the other hand, if the organizational culture is security oriented, the same problem situation would cause people to start looking for rules, procedures as a mode of response.Organizational culture is also known as "corporate culture” that has a major impact on the performance of organization and especially on the quality of work life experienced by the employees. If people in the organization follow the same culture and accept the cultures as well, there would be unity formed within the organization that would lead to higher levels of efficiency resulting in an increase in the levels of performance.
It is known that an increase in performance can lead to the development of a culture, which could lead to culture homogeneity in the way the organization works. A common culture results in having a common goal. People would agree to the decisions made more easily and be motivated to work, as the decisions made are the same as the goal of the people. Therefore, if an organization has a high degree of acceptance and sharing for the cultures, it has a strong culture. If it has a low degree, the people in the organization do not share the same values, thus contradict each other, resulting in conflict.
The culture is perceived as a week that reduces the efficiency level and performance of the organization.Culture is considered as a regulatory mechanism to regulate complex situations, resulting higher efficiency, thus has a high level of performance. If an organization has the ability to adapt to various cultures, depending on the task, it would lead to high levels efficiency as the chaos and confusion created within an organization due to change in the environment and work type would be minimized, thus increasing performance and motivation levels. However, in our educational system there is the divide between academic and administrative sides of an LTO.
The administrative side of an LTO tends towards the role culture because much of its work calls for standardization while the academic side can present a number of different cultural tendencies. This could be a limitation of the organization because it recruits new people who belong to a different culture and ideas.Thus, an LTO should be oriented towards acquiring personnel that share a similar culture because the major issue that arises after an acquisition is incompatibility of workers with the LTO’s environment. This way, the LTO with a strong culture not just helps in increasing the organization performance level, but also increases the opportunities available to the organization and developing a competitive advantage over the other organizations which in the long run becomes an organizational identity.
