Organisational Behaviour For Dummies

Chapter 13

Fitting In: Organisational Culture

In This Chapter

Defining organisational culture

Seeing how culture influences employees and organisations

Changing organisational culture

Identifying and solving safety culture issues

In this chapter, we look at organisational culture. We explain why understanding culture helps you make sense of what’s going on in an organisation and where an organisation is going in the future.

We also explore the amount of influence that culture has on an organisation’s success or failure, especially during times of great change – for example, during mergers and acquisitions. Finally, we look at a specific example of culture – safety – and show the effect that transforming culture can have – in this case, decreasing the number of accidents and making work a safer place to be.

If you haven’t read Chapter 4 where we explore attitudes, you may want to read it now. There we explain how attitudes at work shape the culture of an organisation. We also discuss changing attitudes and the things that can influence attitude change. This chapter looks at shared ...