Organizational culture is all about competing values of different type of culture that people act and interact within organization. Culture is considered to be the Skeleton that organizations cannot live long without defining its competing value and understand what glue is driving the organization, despite the impact of negative or positive aspects towards the organization growth. Therefore the institution would want to make sure that they possess the appropriate and positive atmospheric working environment. It is all about people behavior and attitude that the institution got saturated with, over a long period of time.

Over a period of time certain behavior could be developed and becomes a norm that spreads across the institution. For instance a set of behaviors which are considered negative that rule over the organization with internal customer complaints “employee” and or external customer complaints “clients” that will have an uncomfortable culture versus positive culture as such “customer centric” that would have an impact on organizational characteristics, leadership and management of the employee and determine the strategic prominence and measures of success.

Therefore the organization behavior plays a big role in the organization structure that could become an organization tradition or standardized working environment over the time, in turn which could lead to a potential comfortable zone or unpleasant working environment for business growth. The culture can have an internal focus and external focus versus stability and organization flexibility, yet the organization culture can be categorized with a mixture of four areas of different emphasis, clan culture, adhocracy culture, hierarchy culture and market culture.

The organization develops its culture over the years having either positive or negative impact over its people which will affect the business growth. The impact will only be visible when there is a business boom and the organization have to cope-up with the change and speed-up with innovation but the organization would find it impossible to do so or recession may hit where cuts are on the way to all resources and staff in which will create uncertainty and fear of lack of efficient work and proficiency, or perhaps there is a joined venture with another institution and the organization is worried about collaboration and efficiency. Therefore there will be a need for a culture assessment to determine the current culture and achieve the desired one.

Once the organization is able to determine the current organization culture and get the gap between the desired cultures, a plan of change management is needed to be addressed in order to put the organization on the right track.

The organization’s value, mission and behavior response must be reviewed to understand the original cause of culture setback with full understanding about the gap developed by the culture assessment. The organization needs to have a clear road map and practical recommendation towards a healthier culture that would drive the organization forward.

By Rawhey Dabagh
Sr. Consultant