Organisation Culture

Role Culture

This approach to culture is frequently used in large organizations that operate in a hierarchal structure. In this type of culture, decision making is usually made by the managers of each department who are consulted by their employees, making the role culture approach unsuitable for small businesses where there are fewer employees and less hierarchal layers. This eliminates the need to regularly gather all departments together each time as employee’s roles and expectations are made clear to them by the manager within their department or team. An example of an organization that role culture would be deemed suitable in is a large supermarket such as Sainsbury’s where there are many structural layers and departments. Role culture is suitable in such a business because it allows department managers to delegate to staff and make decisions which increase overall efficiency of the running of business.

Task Culture

This type of culture encourages the workforce to work as a united team working on different tasks that aim towards a mutual goal rather than individual targets, which is in many ways the complete opposite of what the Role Culture suggests. The fact that employees are encouraged to work as a task-focused team gives them a greater sense of responsibility and therefore provides motivation which in turn increases productivity and efficiency. This sort of culture is most commonly present in sports organizations such as football or cricket. For example in football, each player has their own individual role or ‘task’ which they must fulfill in order to achieve their shared aim of winning.

Person Culture

The Person Culture describes a business approach where individuals are given decision making power to make their own choices. It is a type of culture which best suits individuals who work independently and have a lot of responsibility such as a plumber or a builder. For example, a plumber would make all of the decisions concerning their work including things such as how much to charge customers, where to purchase materials from, and all other aspects of their job. This approach to culture can also be successful in other types of organizations as it allows individuals to excel in what they feel they are good at and gives them the opportunity to develop in areas that could do with improvement.

The problems of trying to classify culture into one of the four types described above:

One of the main problems of trying to classify culture into one of the four types described above is that it automatically restricts an organization from exploring other cultural approaches. It is not uncommon for an organization to incorporate several different organizational cultures within their activities as different aspects of culture can be allocated to different departments or hierarchal levels in accordance with how suitable they are. Rather than applying just one form of culture to the overall organization, one would reap many more benefits through the use of knowledge and theories and using a combination of approaches to create a more advantageous cultural plan.

Conclusion

To conclude this topic, all organizations differ from one to the other and therefore their organizational cultures differ. The type of culture selected by the company differs depending on a number of different factors, one of the main ones being the nature of the market in which they belong to. However, organizations don’t have to be restricted to only one type of culture. Instead, a combination of different cultural approaches may result in a more suitable and better constructed system of culture within the business. For example, allocating different cultural roles to different departments according to how suitable they are for that particular group would result in a collection of different organization cultures therefore making it impossible to categorize a company in to one type.

References

1) CIPD (2010) Vision and values: organisational culture and values as a source of competitive advantage [Online] Available from: http://www.cipd.co.uk/research/_visionandvalues.htm [Accessed 18 April 2010]

2) The Times 100 2009: Corporate and Organizational Culture [Online] Available from: http://www.thetimes100.co.uk/theory/theory--corporate-organisational-culture--322.php (accessed 18 April 2010)