BU288 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Organizational Culture, Work Hard, Play Hard, Westjet
Document Summary
Bu 288 organizational culture and organizational change. The shared beliefs, values and assumptions that exist in an organization. These shared beliefs, values and assumptions determine the norms that develop and the patterns of behaviour that emerge from these norms. Culture represents a true way of life for organizational members. Culture involves basic assumptions, values and beliefs, it tends to be fairly stable over time. Even with core member turnover, culture can persist. Content of a culture can be both internal and external matters: internal: culture supports risk taking, innovation, or secrecy of information, external: putting the customer first, or behaving unethically towards the competitors. Culture is a social variable reflecting the social influence of an organization, not just the reflection of an organization"s technology/products/size. For example, there"s a tendency for large companies to become more bureaucratic as they get larder. But, a large company could also support an informal, non-bureaucratic atmosphere like google for instance.