Organizational Culture and Leadership, Fourth Edition

Chapter 3. CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS: TWO CASE EXAMPLES

In the previous chapter, I indicated in a rather abstract manner how to think about the complex concept of culture as it applies to groups and organizations. I emphasized the need to go beyond the surface levels of artifacts and espoused beliefs and values to the deeper, taken-for-granted shared basic assumptions that create the pattern of cognitions, perceptions, and feelings displayed by the members of the group. Unless we understand what is going on at this deeper level, we cannot really decipher the meaning of the more surface phenomena, and, worse, we might misinterpret them because of the likelihood that we will project our own cultural biases onto the observed phenomena.

In this chapter, ...