In the past several decades, some organizational researchers and managers have used it to describe the norms and practices that organizations develop around their handling of people or as the espoused values and credo of an organization. This sometimes confuses the concept of culture with the concept of climate, and confuses culture as what is with culture as -what ought to be.
Thus managers speak of developing the “right kind of culture,” a “culture of quality,” or a “culture of customer service,” suggesting that culture has to do with certain values that managers are trying to inculcate in their organizations. Also implied in this usage is the assumption that there are better or worse cultures, stronger or weaker cultures, and that the “right” kind of culture would influence how effective organizations are. In the managerial literature, there is often the implication that having a culture is necessary for effective performance and that the stronger the culture, the more effective the organization.
Researchers have supported some of these views by reporting findings that certain cultural dimensions do correlate with economic performance, but this research is hard to evaluate because of the many definitions of culture and the variety of indexes of performance that are used (Wilderom, Glunk, and Maslowski, 2000). Consultants and researchers have touted “culture surveys” and have claimed that they can improve organizational performance by helping organizations create certain kinds of cultures, but these claims are often based on a very different definition of culture than the one I will be arguing for here (Denison, 1990; Sackman and Bertelsman, 2006). As we will see, whether or not a culture is “good” or “bad,” “functionally effective,” or not, depends not on the culture alone but on the relationship of the culture to the environment in which it exists.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of culture as a concept is that it points us to phenomena that are below the surface, that are powerful in their impact but invisible and to a considerable degree unconscious. Culture creates within us mindsets and frames of reference that Marshak (2006) identified as one of a number of important covert processes. In another sense, culture is to a group what personality or character is to an individual. We can see the behavior that results, but we often cannot see the forces underneath that cause certain kinds of behavior. Yet, just as our personality and character guide and constrain our behavior, so does culture guide and constrain the behavior of members of a group through the shared norms that are held in that group.
Culture as a concept is thus an abstraction. If an abstract concept is to be useful to our thinking, it should be observable yet increase our understanding of a set of events that are otherwise mysterious or not well understood. From this point of view, I will argue that we must avoid the superficial models of culture and build on the deeper, more complex anthropological models.
Source: Organizational Culture and Leadership, 4th Edition, Edgar H. Schein, 2010