Organizational Culture and Leadership, Fourth Edition

Part II. The Dimensions of Culture

In Part I, I defined and described culture as a structural concept. The formal structure is the same whether we are describing macrocultures, organizational cultures, occupational subcultures, or microcultures in small groups. However, the content of culture—what an observer would view as the actual rules, norms, values, and basic assumptions of a given culture—might vary considerably, both in terms of which content dimensions might be most relevant to understanding that culture and in terms of the position along these dimensions. For example, it might be crucial in trying to understand a given organization to understand how it manages authority relationships (a basic dimension of the culture) and whether it ...