At this point it has become obvious that metaphors are a favorite way of explaining organizations. So here is another. Culture. But culture is hard to define. It can be argued that what separates different cultures is a mixture of values, symbols and behaviors (Miller 2009). The cultural approach therefore ties in greatly with some organizational communication challenges. For example, with globalization and changing demographics (people of different gender and ethnicity et cetera in one organization), companies are becoming less distinctive (Eisenberg & Riley 2000).
Despite the complexity of organizational culture, there are four issues which are mostly agreed on by today’s scholars: organizational cultures are complicated, emergent, not unitary, and are ambiguous (Miller 2009).
A relevant definition of culture provided by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (2011, p. 1) is:
the integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that depends upon the capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations
This definition is similar to Edgar Schein’s (1992) definition of the culture of a social group. Schein then developed his ideas into a model of culture, the three levels of which can be seen pictured below.
Schein’s model shows us that organizational culture is determined by individuals’ values and assumptions, that cultures are constantly changing to adapt to environmental contingencies, that within organizations are subcultures in which relationships can vary greatly, and that it is communication between organizational members that produces and maintains a culture.
This model was demonstrated in the case study ‘The Cultural Tale of Two Shuttles’ (Miller 2009). This compared the disasters of Challenger and Columbia, two space shuttles which ended in disastrous disintegrations, killing all crew members. In both cases, a small technical fault (which had been brought up by those lower in the hierarchical structure) caused the disasters. However, the poor NASA culture (the assumption that the opinion of those higher in hierarchical structure is more important than others, the value of launching on time and gaining good publicity, and the artifact of closed communication channels) led to the behaviors which resulted in such disaster.
References
Eisenberg, E & Riley, P 2000, ‘Organizational culture’, in Jablin, F & Putnam, L (eds), The new handbook of organizational communication: advances in theory, research, and methods, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, Calif.
Merriam-Webster 2011, Culture, viewed 5 September 2011,
Miller, K 2009, Organizational communication: approaches and processes, 6th ed, Wadsworth, Cengage Learning, Boston, MA.
Schein, EH 1992, Organizational culture and leadership, 2nd ed. Jossey-Bass, San Francisco.
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