Historical Foundation and Definition of Organizational Culture

Research on organizational culture has its roots in anthropol­ogy. This research relies heavily on qualitative methods that use participant observation, interviews, and examination of historical information to understand how culture provides a context for understanding individual, group, and societal be­havior. The first systematic attempt to investigate work organi­zations in cultural terms began in the 1930s during the final phase of the Hawthorne studies at the Western Electric Com­pany (Trice & Beyer, 1993). This study began as an empirical investigation of the relationship between light intensity and productivity, but qualitative methods (i.e., employee inter­views) were used to explain counterintuitive results showing that productivity increased for a select group of employees re­gardless of the physical surroundings. Although this study's results have been questioned, it still represents one of the first qualitative studies of individual and group behavior. Further­more, Gardner published the first textbook that examined organizations from a cultural perspective in 1945. Interest in an anthropological approach to studying work organizations nonetheless waned from the 1940s through early 1960s. Although there was a resurgence in anthropologically based studies in the 1960s (e.g., Trice, Belasco, & Alutto, 1969) and 1970s (e.g., Mintzberg, 1973), the topic of organizational cul­ture did not become prominent until the 1980s.

This interest in organizational culture was stirred by anec­dotal evidence contained in three best-selling books: Ouchi's (1981) Theory Z: How American Business Can Meet the Japanese Challenge; Deal and Kennedy's (1982) Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life; and Peters and Waterman's (1982) In Search of Excellence. Each sug­gested that strong organizational cultures were associated with organizational effectiveness. The number of applied and scholarly publications on the topic of organizational culture has mushroomed since 1982 (Barley, Meyer, & Gash, 1988) and is likely to continue in light of findings suggesting that organizational culture is one of the biggest barriers to creat­ing and leveraging knowledge assets (De Long & Fahey, 2000), to effectively implementing total quality management programs (Tata & Prasad, 1998) and to successfully imple­menting technological innovations (DeLisi, 1990).

The concept of organizational culture has a variety of mean­ings and connotations. For example, Verbeke, Volgering, and Hessels (1998) identified 54 different definitions in the literature between 1960 and 1993. Part of this inconsistency is due to the fact that culture researchers represent an eclectic group that come from a variety of disciplines such as sociology, anthropology, and psychology and use different epistemolo-gies and methods to investigate organizational culture. That

568 Organizational Culture and Climate

said, Hofstede, Neuijen, Ohayv, and Sanders (1990) conclude that there are some common characteristics across the different definitions of organizational culture. These commonalities in­clude the notion that organizational culture includes multiple layers (Schein, 1992) and aspects (i.e., cognitive and symbolic) of an organizational context (Mohan, 1993), that organiza­tional culture is a socially constructed phenomenon influenced by historical and spatial boundaries (Rowlinson & Procter, 1999; Schein, 2000), and the concept of "shared" meaning that is central to understanding an organization's culture.

Although a variety of definitions of culture that integrate these commonalities have been offered, the most comprehen­sive one was offered by Schein (1992), who concludes that the culture of a group—the term group refers here to social

units of all sizes—is defined as I

a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integra­tion, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to per­ceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems, (p. 12)

Schein suggests that organizational culture is learned by group members who pass it on to new group members through a variety of socialization and communication processes. This definition also implies that overt behavior, although not di­rectly part of organizational culture, is clearly influenced by the basic assumptions or ideologies (Trice & Beyer, 1993) people hold. Finally, Schein does not specify the size of the so­cial unit to which a culture can be applied. This implies that or­ganizations can have subcultures and that it is inappropriate to talk about a so-called universal culture, a notion that is still being debated in the literature (Harris & Ogbonna, 1999)