Organizational Culture

The interest in the organizational culture was initially driven by a desire to understand its impact on organizational performance. The economic success of Japanese companies in the 1980s, at a time when western firms were seen as inefficient bureaucracies, also gave impetus to the culture literature. Japanese companies seemed to have particular methods of employment management that created committed employees capable of producing high quality goods (1). Culture can be defined as the set of the key values, beliefs, understandings, and norms shared by members of an organization (2). The idea of culture has a much longer history. Jaques (1952) was perhaps the first to use to term within a work context in his The Changing Culture of a Factory, which analyzed participatory management in a metal company. Subsequently psychologists like Argyris (1964) noted the effects of the organizational values on individual psychological health. Writers like Pascale and Athos (1980), Peters and Waterman (1982) and Deal and Kennedy (1982) argued for the replacement of the old fashioned values with strong cultures. The message was that in order to be successful, companies had to change their core values. The strong use of culture therefore links the management of culture to organizational success. This approach has been most clearly found in the work of Peters and Waterman (1982), Deal and Kennedy (1982) and Kanter (3).