Dimensions of Organizational Culture and beyond

Abstract

Organization theorists and psychologists are focusing their attention on organizational culture. Similar to political psychologists, organizational analysts concentrate on leadership and group dynamics. Organization psychologists like Edgar Schein (1985) claim, for example, that leaders are in the business of creating and managing cultures within institutions, and that groups are the site of the development, containment, or destruction of cultures. Schein and his contemporaries concern themselves with explicit culture, which refers to directly observable aspects of culture of which members are aware. Explicit culture includes standards of right and wrong and typical patterns of behavior and technology (1969, p. 96). In addition, they concern themselves with (what they claim to be) the deepest layer of organizational culture that is found within groups, where underlying basic assumptions govern interactions and decision making-what sociologists call implicit culture (Theodorson and Theodorson, 1969). Culture, Schein writes, can now be defined as (a) a pattern of basic assumptions, (b) invented, discovered, or developed by a given group, (c) as it learns to cope with its of external adaptation and internal integration, (d) that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore (e) is to be taught to new members as the (f) correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems (1990, p. 111). Organizational culture, for Schein, is a collective defense mechanism in which members learn to cope with the internal and external pressures of managing institutions. While attentive to the implicit and tacit dimensions, Schein's definition and analysis of organizational culture rests on a functionalist anthropological framework that is influenced by systems theory, Lewinian field theory, and cognitive theory. He writes: . . the deepest level of culture will be the cognitive in that perceptions, language, and thought processes that a group comes to share will be the ultimate causal determinant of

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