Organizational Culture

Ok, let's get away from most of the entertainment stuff posted below and plagiarize some more academic words here talking about "organizational culture", a very familiar phrase that I ever took a MPA course to study but hardly can now recollect the details. I wrote a report of a cultural analysis on a public library after some observation and several interviews with the managers asking about the answers to the questions that were previously prepared. The paper is based on the so called "artifacts", "espoused values", and "assumptions". Here follows some concept reviews that look to some extent friendly to me:

(From "Introduction to E-commerce", 2/e, by Jeffrey F. Rayport, Bernard J. Jaworski)

Understanding a company's culture is complicated by the fact that culture resides in the background; member of an organization tend not to be consciously aware of it. A further complication is that many elements of culture, including underlying values and assumptions, are not directly observable but rather must be inferred from the "feel" of an organization and its patterns of action, communication, relationships, and so forth. For these reasons, deciphering and interpreting a particular culture is perhaps most easily accomplished by referring to generic culture types.

A number of models of organizational culture propose four or five generic culture types. One such model differentiates cultures along two dimensions: the degree to which the organization is outwardly versus inwardly focused and the degree to which the organization relies on highly specified roles, processes, and routines. The four resulting culture types are called adaptive, committed, bureaucratic, and entrepreneurial. Keep in mind that the an organization may not fit precisely in any one category; although one generic type is likely to best describe the culture, elements of each of the other cultural types are also likely to be found.

Orientation – external, specificity – low: Entrepreneurial
-Unbounded by rules and precedents
-Willing to take risks
-Flexible
-Innovative

Orientation – external, specificity – high: Adaptive
-Proactively identifies issues
-Good at planning and setting goals
-Responsive to market changes
-Outcome-oriented

Orientation – internal, specificity – low: Committed
-Emphasizes internal cohesion, participation, teamwork, and loyalty

Orientation – internal, specificity – high: Bureaucratic
-Emphasizes stability, established routines, and formal authority