Organisational Culture

Organisational Culture is the unwritten beliefs, attitudes, values, and expectations about how people work within the organisation.

Aspects:
Visible Aspect of a Company:
The visible aspect of an organisation are features of a company that can be seen by the public. Examples of this would be the uniform that staff wear, building structure of a company and so on.

Hidden Aspects of a Company:
The hidden aspect of a company are features of a company that cannot be seen by the public. Examples of that would be the values, the attitudes, the beliefs of a company and so on.

Organisational Culture theory:
There are two theories about Organisational Culture. one is the Iceberg theory by French and Bell, 1990, and the other one is the Organisational Onion theory by Schein,1912.


Iceberg theory:
If you look at in iceberg, only 1/10th of it is visible above the surface and the rest 9/10th is submerged beneath the water. These two theorists use this as an example to say that an organisation only has 1/10th of visible aspects (formal) and 9/10th of it is not visible (informal).

Formal Organisation:

• Goals
• Strategy
• Structure
• Systems and procedures
• Products and services
• Financial resources
• Management

Informal Organisation:

• Values, attitudes and beliefs
• Leadership styles
• Norms of behaviours
• Power and Politcs
• Informal groupings

Onion Theory:
The onion theory says that an organisation is like an onion and that the outter layer is the visible aspect and as these layers are pealed off, the deeper and hidden aspect of the company.

Visible aspect of culture (Outter aspect):

• Physical office layouts
• Uniforms
• Languages
• Status Symbols
• Rites and Rituals

Values and beliefs (semi hidden aspects):

• Values serving as guidelines for action

Basic assumption (hidden aspects):

• Fundamuntal basis of orgnisation

M&S:
Here i will be talking about the visible and hidden aspects of M&S when i went to Eden shopping centre to observe it.

Visible Aspect:

• M&S uniform
• The building structure was a modern and attractive one
• Calm relaxing music
• freindly staffs

Hidden Aspect:

• Their brand name
• Their beliefs of every product has quality
• eveyr staff had a different role e.g. management, duty management, sales assistant, all these people had different roles to do.
• the way the manager manages the store, i could see him going around and talking to staff. maybe he was giving feedbacks.

Four types of cultures:

Charles Handy is regarded by many as the most advanced management thinker in the world. His early work, such as his 'Motivation Calculus' , has been steadily surpassed and extended by his more recent modern and sophisticated thinking about the purpose of work, business and organizations.

Handy was born in 1932 and is popularly regarded as Britain's greatest management visionary. He graduated from Oxford and worked for Shell International, and during two years at the Sloan School of Management became a protégé of Warren Bennis, the organizational and leadership guru.

Handy's first book, Understanding Organisations (1976, revised 1991) is well regarded. Gods Of Management (1978), is another highly regarded work, in which Handy uses a metaphor of the Greek Gods to explain different organizational cultures:

• Zeus (power, patriarchy, 'the club' culture)
• Apollo (order, reason, bureaucracy, the 'rôle' culture)
• Athena (expertise, wisdom, meritocracy, 'task' culture)
• Dionysus (individualism, professionalism, non-corporate, person culture)

(http://www.businessballs.com/charleshandy.htm, accessesd: 25/10/09)

Power Culture:
This culture is all about one or two person being in power, and telling staff what to do. All decisions are made by that one or two person, this kind of culture is normally in a small or medium type of organisation.The advantage of this type of culture is that when making decisions there won't be any disagreements or any problems as there will be only one person making them. However the drawback of this type of culture is that it can easily demotivate staff, as they mostly have no say and only do what they are told to do.

Role Culture:
This culture is when different employees of an organisation have different roles. therefore each staff is concentrating one role and as time goes they will be more used to their role and execute them faster. This type of culture is mainly used in large organisations and the advantage of it is that employees will focus on one particular role and therefor this will be able to increase productivity of a company. The disadvantage is that because the employee will be doing the same thing all the time, this may demotivate them on the long run.

Task Culture:
This type of culture is where employees are put in a time and have to complete a task/project together before a given deadline. This type of culture is mostly used by companies employing engineers or architechts to create and complete plans by a deadline for a building in construction or ect... The advantages of this type of culture is that employees will be motivated as they have more freedom towards decisions and have been given a huge responsibility; however the disadvantage of this type of culture is that since its a team, if one does not meet the deadline, this may ruin the whole project.

Person Culture:
This type of culture is mostly adapted by self employed employees, where they make decisions and are the centre of the business. This will include people such as barristers, sugeons and ect... This type of business are sometimes non profit business such as charities aswel. the advantages of this is that employees are highly motivated as the pay is usually high and they make most of the decisions, however the disadvantage is that due to the minority level of those type of people companies won't have as much power as they could on a normal employee.

(http://www.learnmanagement2.com/culture.htm, accessed: 25/10/09)

Problems of trying to classify culture in one of the four types described above:
The problem with this is that an organisation, in my point of view cannot be classed in only one of the culture above. For example if you take an organisation such as M&S, in their stores you could say that they have a role culture as every staff have different roles. Some staff will be on the shop floor and some on the tills, management will be doing price verifications or check any changes and monitor staff. This would fit in the role culture. In their headquaters they could be doing projects as a team to improve their stores, this would fit in task cultures. All major changes of the stores would be made by high ranked chief executivs which would fit in power culture. Just here M&S fits in three kind of cultures.

A company that demonstrate a strong culture:
I believe that M&S demonstrate a strong culture, and and i have decided to explain about it as i am one their regular customers. Their stronger culture would be the role culture as they mainly operate many stores around the country and most of their staffs have different roles in stores. Every time customers go to M&S they see staff doing different things, regular customers will notice that the same staff will be doing the same work most of the time they go shopping but they may swap with another staff where they would go on the till and the other one on the shop floor. Managers don't seem to have a problem with that as long as they do their work. this also gives a little change for the employee which won't demotivate them as much.

Conclusion:
Overall organisational cultures play a key role towards the success of an organisation. Without these cultures an organisation won't stand and grow for long, as these different cultures which partly represent the companies and differ them from any other, keep customers and employees happy.