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)