Behind the Scenes of Health Care

CHAPTER 4

Culture, Subculture, and Attribution

Organizational culture is a behavioral web composed of shared beliefs and values among workgroups, individuals, and the overall organization. This web holds varying degrees of influence on employees and groups where, as outlined later, cultural factors can be shown to consistently and uniformly exist with dependency. Likewise, cultural independence can be identified where workgroups hold cultural measures and motivational factors which are not consistent with the larger organization or other similar groups. As an example, a cultural analysis of one hospital compared to the parent health system may collectively be consistent with the rest of the organization. However, within work groups, differences ...