Question

QUIZ: UH 2 Quiz Time Limit: 00:45:00 Submit Quiz This Question: 1 pt 6 of 25 (3 complete) This Quiz: 25 pts possible With an emphasis on the rapidly changing business landscape, which organizational culture can be beneficial in requiring adaptability? O A. innovative culture OB. ethical culture O c. customer-responsive culture OD. learning culture O E. sustainability culture Click to select your answer.

Answer 1

The formal definition of organizational culture offered in 1984 by Schein:
“organizational culture is the pattern of basic assumptions that a given group has invented,
discovered, or developed in learning to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal
integration, and that have worked well enough to be considered valid, and, therefore, to be taught
to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems”The concept of organizational culture derives from the research on culture and has been largely
discussed in the management literature. Culture has first
been analysed in ethnic and national comparison in fields, such as anthropology, sociology and social psychology.

Culture could be managed, changed and used as a means to achieving greater organizational outcomes. In this respect, leadership style and national and personal values of the company’s founders influence the creation of organizational culture. Leadership can change artefacts and values to enable new culture to be created. The basic underlying assumptions are often disregarded in that view. This view is about understanding culture as what an organization has."Organization as a culture" suggests that organizations are creating meanings and values through the social relations established between people within the organization.

All in all in terms of cultural change, few "visible" or "explicit" cultural aspects among those are artifacts, values and climate may be "manageable" as products so that they can be changed by external forces such as new policies but for the cultural change to be successful and sustainable, these explicit changes will need to be embedded in "deeper, visible or implicit" culture aspects (some values, norms and cultural assumptions) that are often the result of new social interactions in the organization. Integrating our understanding of culture and/or cultural change into a definition results in considering organizational culture as follows:
organizational culture is a social process and a set of values, norms and assumptions that are developed and sustained in this social process. It is composed of a visible/explicit culture and an invisible/implicit culture. The explicit culture is defined and communicated by the management in and out side the organizational boundaries, and guide action and meaning to what is to be done, and how activities should be carried out at different levels of the organization. The implicit culture is the results of the daily human, social and personal interactions between individuals in the organizational boundaries.

The rapidly changing environment in which organizations operate demands adequate and fast organizational response. Organizations answer such demand with new forms of organizing among those projects. Project management can be seen as a process tool to react on fast changing environment and to be efficient and competitive. But beyond what could be seen as the structure of the organizations, the major distinguishing feature of successful companies as well as one of the most powerful factors for their success is their organizational culture. Even if in research, there is still no unique definition of organizational culture, there is no disagreement about the importance of organizational culture and its roles for attaining organization coherence and performance. Culture can be seen as the strategic key of a
competitive advantage. Beyond such consensus, research is still at its infancy when it comes to understand how to develop a sustainable organizational culture. The question becomes whether project management as a form of organization and a set of tools to implement change could in fact become a
tool to develop a sustainable culture. This paper aims at exploring to what extent a sustainable organizational culture for sustainability could be a sustainable outcome of a sustainable project. This is largely based on a literature review where few examples are used to illustrate how Agile or
Management approaches have been discussed and used as a relevant way to use tools and techniques to create sustainable organizational culture. It also shows the centrality as an organizational pattern to develop sustainable culture of adaption and flexibility.