The concept of organisational culture

“Organisational culture represents they system of values, attitudes, habits, assumptions, and beliefs within an organisation, including aspects that may be both directly and indirectly experienced. Organisational culture affects the behaviour and attitudes of members, as it influences the atmosphere of an organisation, the way an organisation deals with its members, goals, environment, thus having an effect on its performance and abilities to adjust to the changing circumstances.” (Kovács et al., 2005:52)

Organisational culture aims to integrate members, support an organisation’s abilities to adapt to changes and reduce the uncertainty of members.

Schein’s (1985) model of organisational culture identifies the implicit, submerged and the visible, observable levels of culture, represented as an iceberg. From a functional perspective, he claimed that organisational culture aims to enhance the integration of members and the abilities of an organisation to react to changes in the environment.

According to Kotter and Heskett (1992) (see Bíró, Serfőző, 2003), organisations with good performance are characterised by the following features:

• strong culture (a well-functioning system of commonly accepted and shared values and norms),
• flexibility (the ability to adapt to changes),
• the culture of an organization harmonises with its strategies,
• takes into consideration its employees’ and superiors’ interests.

Team and group norms (values) significantly influence the behaviour and attitudes of members. There are formal (official, mainly written sets of rules regarding professional conduct) and informal (spontaneous, mainly unwritten sets of rules regarding the behaviour of members, which also affect the individuals’ way of thinking) norms (Baumann, 2006). Should any team member fail to identify with any of these rules, his/her group membership might be at risk. New members in this case may have serious problems with adapting themselves to their new surroundings. Lack of norm-following behaviour in the case of old team members can turn into a factor diminishing overall performance. In both of the above cases, members might quit the team, towards which the first step to be made can be the individual’s demand to terminate the psychological contract, or after that the following step might also be the termination of the official employment or player’s contract.

There are several authors examining the relationship between group cohesion (e.g. Fogarasi, 1994) and organisational culture; therefore, the present section also deals with this issue. In teams with high cohesion and strong organisational culture (as a result of the former), generally conformity to norms is high too (Nagykáldi, 1998).

To conclude, the higher group cohesion is, the more individuals tend to follow team norms, which finally makes it possible for a member to find his place in a team and perform at his best.

Some experts also find strong associations between group cohesion and trust, thus simply defining it as the trust between the members of a group (Siebold, 2007). Furthermore, group cohesion, performance, and satisfaction are factors that seem to reverberate through and influence one another from time to time (Thomas, 1998, see Fig. 5).

Figure 5: The model established by Raymond Thomas (1998)^[1]

According to Denison (1990) (see Bíró, Serfőző, 2003), strong organisational culture may result in the following characteristics:

• it has positive effects on members’ identification with an organisation’s goals,
• it improves performance and motivates members,
• it uses past experience appropriately, resulting in adequately developed learning competence,
• shared values enable members to set goals and select the mode of achieving these goals.

Robbins and Judge (2007) also attribute great significance to the strength of organisational culture. As they see it, the stronger organisational culture is, the better an organisation performs, and the members of such organisations also become much more satisfied (Fig. 6).

Figure 6: Robbins and Judge’s (2007) model of the outcomes of strong organisational culture