Organizational Culture: History and Definition, Conceptualizing Organizational Culture, Organizational Culture Models, Measuring Organizational Culture

History and Definition

The significance of organizational culture was recognized for the first time at the beginning of the second half of the twentieth century. In industrial firms, organizational culture was used to explain the low productivity environment and why rules and procedures failed to improve unhealthy relationships between supervisors and subordinates (Jaques, 1951). Thirty years later, another new concept of organizational culture was introduced: the idea of culture as the social fabric of the organization, contributing to the collective process of establishing a unique organizational character (Pettigrew, 1979). Since then, a number of other definitions have been suggested, for example, considering organizational culture as a factor that differentiates between organizations on the basis of employee mindset, or “'The collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one organization from another” (G. Hofstede, 2004). Other researchers focused on the long-term beliefs characterizing groups and companies (Cameron & Quinn, 2005). Perhaps the most common definition is of organizational culture as a pattern of norms, values, beliefs, assumptions and attitudes that influences behavior within an organization (Chin-Loy & Mujtaba, 2007; Schein, 2010).