The architecture of a building put across an image of the company itself. It affects how the employees work and feel, and how the customer feels. For example, the identity of McDonalds is portrayed in its layout, furniture and lighting. The look of the building signifies status of the company.
Language is another indicator of culture. Universal phrases such as excellence, good service and high quality mean different things in different cultures. The people in a company must interpret these and other concepts in the same way for it to run smoothly. It is also a case of what employees are called; McDonalds has crew members, Debenham’s has co-workers.
Many companies use metaphors as a means of communicating ideas. They can be associated with the game of chess, with “pawns” , “game plans” and “sacrifices”; military with “attacks”, “forays” , “retreats” and “orders”, or the church, where leaders are known as “prophets” and managers give “sermons”.
Stories are artefacts used to describe the organisation’s history. They are good indicators of rules and procedures, and what happens when these aren’t followed. Similar to stories, myths too are artefacts, the difference being that myths aren’t true. Myths can either regulate actions and consequences, conceal political interests and value systems, or give justification for certain organisational phenomena such as women not getting promotion.
Ceremonies are celebrations of organisational culture that reinforce cultural values. For example, the Mary Kay Cosmetics organisation hold awards ceremonies where successful salespeople are celebrated. Rites and rituals are recurrent patterns of behaviour , and can be defined as “relatively elaborate, dramatic, planned sets of activities that consolidate various forms of cultural expression into organised events, which are carried out through social interaction, usually for the benefit of an audience” ( Beyer and Trice 1988: 142). Rites can be either of passage, questioning, or renewal. Ritualised behaviour both promotes a message about the organisation, and helps maintain power over the employees.
Norms of behaviour are prescribed sets of behaviour, like unwritten rules of how and when you should act. They dictate what is appropriate and inappropriate. Norms vary from organisation to organisation. Different types of company will have different figures who it is the norm for the employees to respect, in a bureaucracy it is down to position in the hierarchy, in manufacturing companies it is usually based on experience, and in technical orientated companies it may be based on expertise. Norms keep the organisation running stably and regulate behaviour.
Symbols are “ words, objects, conditions, acts or characteristics of persons that signify something different or wider from themselves, and which have meaning for an individual or group” (Brown 1995: 18) Various things can amount to symbolism, from corporate logos symbolising a company to a worker’s overtime symbolising their loyalty to the company.
The final artefacts are heroes. Heroes have several functions in organisations. They make success seem like a reasonable goal, provide role models, emphasis cultural values, encourage commitment and motivate. Because of this, organisations often go to great lengths to create heroes. However, for some cultures, such as those who value team working, heroes are not beneficial.
The second level of culture was organisational values and beliefs. Schein suggested that this was not the culture either, but the conscious values which underpin the surface manifestations. These are ideas which mean something personally or organisationally to the founders or senior management of an organisation. Employees do not necessarily take on these values; they merely follow the rules and procedures which they are the basis for. They are often publicised within the company; in reports, framed on the walls, and on the company’s website.
Values are linked to moral and ethical ideas which dictate what should be done. Beliefs are what people believe is true. They are hard to distinguish between because they are often interlinked.
At the bottom of Schein’s three levels are basic assumptions. He claimed that this is where the culture lies. They are invisible, preconscious assumptions, and are taken for granted.
Another study is made by Charles Handy. His work is based on that of Harrison (1972) who proposed four types of culture; power, role, task and person. Handy reworked these, referring each one to a Greek God and assigning it a pictogram.
The power culture has a central source of power which spreads rays of influence throughout the company. The rays are connected by functional and specialist strings, which provide for co-ordinated action. Pictorially, this can be seen as a web. Handy associated this type of culture with Zeus, who was the all-powerful leader of the gods on Mount Olympus. To be effective, a power culture relies on trust, empathy and personal communication, with a lack of rules and bureaucracy.
The role culture is organised around logic and rationality, and is a bureaucracy. The structure is like a series of pillars, where the strength of the organisation lies in functions or specialities. These are co-ordinated by a small group of senior executives. Therefore, it is compared to a Greek temple, wit its Greek god being Apollo, the god of reason. The key principles of this type of culture are rules, procedures, and job descriptions.
The task culture revolves around expertise. It is common to organisations which have tasks which require specific skills. It is likened to a lattice shape, with power where the strands intersect. Handy related this type of culture to the god Athena, but later decided that there was no god which related to it appropriately. A good example of an organisation which would work in this way is an advertising agency, in which the market is competitive, and product life spans are short.
The person culture is when people work collectively rather than individually, as in a doctors surgery or solicitors. No individual has more power, and so the organisation can be seen as a cluster. The god associated with this culture is Dionysus, the god of the self-orientated individual. The people in this kind of culture have complete autonomy.
Handy also suggested that organisations are made up of different sub cultures, for different activities. Each of these sub-cultures would develop different values.
Organisational culture affects working life through the ways discussed in this essay, by affecting people’s beliefs and values which in turn affects their behaviour within the company.