Organizational Culture and Its Themes

As one of the key ‘stable factors’, culture within an organization is playing a critical role in the organization’s everyday operations. Although the culture literature has at times focused on the culture of an organization as shared basic assumptions (Schein, 1985), or as metaphors within organizations (Morgan, 1986, 1997), it is not sufficient to attempt to understand and measure them. This paper explores organizational culture in general, some definitions and implications of organizational culture are reviewed from different perspectives, and Cliffe’s cultural themes are addressed with the use of Scholes’ cultural web and Hofstede’s onion diagram model of organizational culture.