Managing and evaluating informal education - Essay Example

Organisational culture has no concrete definition; different researchers have defined in various forms so that ambiguity of the word is cleared to a certain extent. According to Denison (1990) and Celand (1994), cited by Nayak et al. (2011), organisational culture can be defined as “an environment of organisation which is made up of beliefs, practices, customs, knowledge and conventionalised behaviour of a specific social group”. In other words, several researchers have associated different terms with the word ‘culture’ such as shared meanings of symbols, rituals, beliefs, and myths that evolve with the passage of time and reduce variability in human nature and control while shaping employees’ behaviour within the organisation.

Since people are valuable assets of organisations, they are the ones who run the business activities of organisations in the form of teams; culture helps in giving them a meaning, shared vision along with set of rules, principles and standards according to which they have to behave in the respective organisation. There are three levels in organisational culture as identified by Nayak et al. (2011) i.e. artefacts of culture that can be observed, followed by shared values and then common assumptions.

When levels are considered as layers, then when the level is deeper, it becomes difficult to diagnose and analyze organisational culture by going at that level. Lund (2003) has stated that organisational culture in any type of organisation is defined by the shared beliefs, values, perceptions or customs that are held and followed by employees within that particular organisation or its unit. Since organisational culture is a reflection of behavioural norms, beliefs and values that are being used by organisation’s employees, they give meanings to the situations when they encounter it and these culture characteristics