The assessment
of organizational culture is not easy because culture is concerned with both
subjective beliefs and unconscious assumptions which might be difficult to
measure and the observed phenomena such as behavioral norms and artifacts (Ama,
2009:106). A good number of instruments abound for assessing organizational
culture. Two instruments are abound for assessing organizational culture.
The two
instruments are:
(a) Organizational
Ideology Questionnaire: These deals with the four orientations such as
power, role, task and self. The questionnaire is completed by making statement
according to views on what is closed to the organization actual position.
(b) Organizational
Culture Inventory:
This instrument assesses organizational culture like humanistic-helpful,
conventional, dependents etc (usoro, 2002: 96).
Role Of
Ethics In Culture Formation
Ethics is said
to be general idea or belief that influence people’s behaviour and attitude.
Ethics and culture are closely related to an organization available human
energy and its quality rate of sustained improvement. When ethics improves,
culture equally improves. Often ethics are the constraints factor holding back
process capability improvement and sometimes poor process capability encourages
poor ethical behaviour (Botoff, 2006: 358). Also managers do not cause
improvement projects to succeed as much as they think they do. It is the
operating culture or the collection effort that decides which project succeeds
or fail in various degrees.
Ways
Organizations Form Their Culture
Organizational
culture springs from these three situation below:-
. Beliefs, values and assumptions
of founders
. Learning experiences of the group
members, and
. New belief, values and
assumptions brought by new members.
Organizations do not form culture
spontaneously or accidentally. The process of culture formulation is the
process of creating a small group. The founders can have an idea they can bring
in one or more people and create core groups (Ama, 2009: 109).
Need For
Organizational Culture
Basically,
organizational culture is the personality of the organization. Culture
comprises the assumption, values, norms and tangible signs (artifacts) of
organization members and their behaviours (Cater Manamara, 200: 143).
Organization members soon come to sense the particular culture of an
organization. Though culture is difficult to express distinctly, but everyone
knows it when they sense it. For example, the culture of a large profit-making
corporation is quite different from that of a hospital, which is also different
from that of a polytechnic. You can tell culture of an organization by looking
at the arrangement of furniture, what they brag about, what member wear etc.
Corporate culture can be looked at as a system. Inputs include feed-back for
example from the society, professions, laws, stories, heroes on the competition
or services etc. The process is based on our assumptions, values and norms,
example our values on money, time, facilities, space and people. Output or
efforts of our culture are for example organizational behaviours, technologies,
strategies, images, products, services, appearances etc (Cater Manamara, 200:
144).
Culture is particularly importance when
attempting to manage organizational wide change. Practitioners are coming to
realize that despite the best-laid plan, organizational change must include not
only changing structures and processes but also changing the organizational
culture as well. Since organizational member, have no instinct to direct their
actions, their behaviour must be based on guide-lines that are learned. In
other for organization to operate effectively, these guide-lines must be shared
by its members. Without a shared culture, members of the organization would be
unable to communicate and cooperate, which invariably will result to confusion
and disorderliness among members martin Holborn et al, 2006: 416). This implies
culture has two essential qualities,
Viz:
. It is learned
and
. It is shared.
Without it,
there would be no human society let alone organization.