[MUSIC] The very popular definition of organizational culture is the way things are down around here. And we only really understand an organisational culture by immersing ourselves within it. Now culture is a very powerful aspect of any organization. Often academics use the metaphor of an iceberg. And if you picture an iceberg you know that what we see on the surface is far smaller than what we don't see. So beneath the water's surface the iceberg is much, much bigger to what we can visually see. And that's really a good metaphor for culture because we can see certain aspects of it when we visually go into an organization as an employee or a customer. But there's so much of it that we don't see unless we're actually working in the organization. So depicting this iceberg and applying it is Schein's three levels of culture. Schein is a very well known writer of organizational culture. And in 1985, which I appreciate is some time ago now, but it's generic and it can still be applied, he came up with these three levels. The first level is the organization's artefacts, a superficial level of culture. So it's what we see. And examples of artifacts are things like organization charts. It could be the size of offices. It could be the plushness of decor. It could be the allocated car parking spaces within an organization. It could be the quality of the cars themselves. It could be how people dress within the organization. So things that we can see immediately on entering an organization which helps us to draw some conclusions about the culture. So for example in an organization maybe on the lower levels of the organization there's more of the operational staff whereas on. Occupying the offices of the top level are the most senior members of staff. We then begin to get a view that people are treated differently. That the organization is quite hierarchical. If there's allocated car parking spaces in the car park again we begin to see people being treated differently in an organization depending on their status. Equally if we go into somewhere like McDonald's, a fast food restaurant, what we see is bright colors, bright lights, hard seats, fast service. That's the the culture of the organization as a customer. They don't want us to spend hours sitting there having our burger. They want us to go in and go out in a very bright, quite intense atmosphere. So we can quickly begin to start to identify culture through the artifacts, what we see, and these are also known as the overt, the overt aspects of culture, the things we can easily see. We then have beliefs, values, and attitudes, and that's the beliefs, values, and attitudes of the organization. And we often talk about the espoused beliefs, values, and attitudes. So when the organization is saying what they're mission statement are, they publicize they're values, they publicize all their corporate social responsibility activities, that's their espoused beliefs, values, and attitudes. It's also how things take place at an organization, so how teams form, how meetings are run, how decisions are made. We only get to know this as we embed ourselves further within the organization. The final level of our Basic Assumptions. Now, if I draw an arrow up here, this is very much the covert aspects of the the organizations. The things that we don't see as we just come into the organization. This is what's going on underneath. So if we think back to our iceberg metaphor, what's going on underneath the surface. We can have arrows going down, and equally, we can have arrows going up. So, this aspect of culture is if you like the deepest, the deepest level of culture. And then we go up to the superficial or the surface level of culture. This is very difficult to discern, unless, as I've said before, you're working in the organization. So it's really, I like to call it the personality of the organization. It's what's real. It's what's lived. And all organizations will have their processes, their procedures, the uniforms that we have to wear, how we treat our customers, etc. But this is actually what happens, what truly is happening, Within the organization. It's about the deeply embedded values that we carry to work every single day. It's at this level that we begin to understand why teams for in a certain way. Why that person is making those key decisions. It drips down and comes back up again. Often that we talk about the politics of an organization, the gossip, the informality. That's all happening here. If this is misaligned with this or with this we have something called the cultural drift. And what that means is, what this organization is saying they're about or what they physically represent actually they're not. So if it's an organization that's espousing wonderful human values, they pride themselves on treating their staff well, staff have career progression. But actually, when you talk to the staff where you work there yourselves, that's not the case. There's going to be a problem. So what you have then, is this cultural drift which means that what's being said, what's being espoused is actually different from what is being lived in the organization. Now, if this isn't aligned, that's going to mean that the mission is not going to be achieved. The goals and objectives aren't going to be achieved and is going to be problems. Culture is a very, very powerful asset of any organization and it needs to be listened to by managers and understood very well. [MUSIC]
