Professor Mohamed Zairi

Transforming Organisational Culture Professor Mohamed Zairi

Organisational culture is an important concept since it has a widespread influence on the behaviours and actions of employees. It represents a powerful force on an organisation's strategies, structures and systems, the way it responds to change and ultimately how well the organisation performs. The task for owners and managers is to achieve the right blend of cultures for the organisation's task and environment. However, managing culture is not a short-term or straightforward task, since it goes beyond slogans and new mission statements: real change requires modifications to values, basic assumptions and behaviour that are not easy to achieve, but is increasingly important for many organisations. Handy (1993), expanded this as deep set beliefs about the way work should be organised, the way authority should be exercised, people rewarded, people controlled-these are all aspects of the culture of an organisation. Scheine (1992), refers to culture as 'the deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are shared by members of the organisation that operates unconsciously and define in a basic 'taken for granted' fashion an organisation's view of itself and its environment'. Moorhead and Griffin (1992), define organisational culture as 'a set of values, often taken for granted that people in an organisation understand. It reflects the ways work is performed, and what is acceptable and not acceptable, and what actions are encouraged and discouraged'. Therefore culture can be said to refer to the underlying beliefs, values and dos of practice that makes an organisation what it is. Handy (1993), simplifies this by suggesting that culture is 'the way things are done around here'.