Title: 8.5 Creating and Maintaining Organizational Culture – Principles of Management
Headings: 8.5 Creating and Maintaining Organizational Culture
8.5 Creating and Maintaining Organizational Culture
Learning Objectives
How Are Cultures Created?
Founder Values
Industry Demands
How Are Cultures Maintained?
Attraction-Selection-Attrition
New Employee Onboarding
What Can Employees Do During Onboarding?
What Can Organizations Do During Onboarding?
What Can Organizational Insiders Do During Onboarding?
Leadership
Reward Systems
Signs of Organizational Culture
Mission Statement
Rituals
Rules and Policies
Impact of HR Practices on Organizational Culture
Physical Layout
Stories and Language
Key Takeaway
Exercises
References

Content: Understanding this question is important in understanding how they can be changed. An organization’s culture is shaped as the organization faces external and internal challenges and learns how to deal with them. When the organization’s way of doing business provides a successful adaptation to environmental challenges and ensures success, those values are retained. These values and ways of doing business are taught to new members as the way to do business (Schein, 1992). The factors that are most important in the creation of an organization’s culture include founders’ values, preferences, and industry demands. Figure 8.11 Model Describing How Cultures Are Created and Maintained
Founder Values
A company’s culture, particularly during its early years, is inevitably tied to the personality, background, and values of its founder or founders, as well as their vision for the future of the organization. When entrepreneurs establish their own businesses, the way they want to do business determines the organization’s rules, the structure set up in the company, and the people they hire to work with them. For example, some of the existing corporate values of the ice cream company Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Holdings Inc. can easily be traced to the personalities of its founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield. In 1978, the two high school friends opened up their first ice-cream shop in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont. Their strong social convictions led them to buy only from the local farmers and devote a certain percentage of their profits to charities.