The concept of organizational culture has received increasing attention in recent years both from academies and practitioners. Culture needs to be defined and analyzed properly if it has to be used in the field of organizational psychology to understand organizational behavior and the cultural changes taking place. Organizational culture as a concept has a fairly recent origin although, the concepts of "group norms" and "climate" have been used by psychologists for a long time. However, "culture" has been explicitly used only in the last few decades. Katz and Kahn (1978), in their second edition of the Social Psychology of Organizations, referred to roles, norms, and values, but presented neither climate nor culture as explicit concepts. Organizational "climate" by virtue of being a more salient cultural phenomenon, lent itself to direct observation and measurement and thus has had a longer research tradition.
But climate is only a surface manifestation of culture, and thus research on climate has not enabled us to delve into the deeper causal aspects of how organizations function. We need variations in climate and norms, and it is this need that ultimately drives us to "deeper" concepts such as culture. Serious students of organizational culture point out that each culture researcher develops explicit or implicit paradigms that bias not only the definition of key concepts, but the whole approach to the study of the phenomenon (Barley, Meyer and Gash 1988; Martin and Mayerson, 1988; Off; 1989; Smirich and Calas,-1987; Van Maanen, 1988). One probable reason for this diversity of approaches is that culture, like role, lies at the intersection of several social sciences and reflects some bias of each-specifically, those of anthropology, sociology, social psychology and organizational behavior. In this article, one paradigm will be discussed which is firmly anchored in social psychology and anthropology, and which is somewhat integrative-in that it allows one to position other paradigms in a common conceptual space.
This line of thinking lead us conceptually into territory left insufficiently explored by such concepts as "climate", "norm" and "attitude". Many of the research methods of industrial and organizational psychology are weak when applied to the concept of culture. If we are to take culture seriously, we must first adopt a more clinical and ethnographic approach to identify clearly the kinds of dimensions and variables that can usefully lend themselves to more precise empirical measurement and hypothesis testing. Though there have been many efforts to be empirically precise about cultural phenomena, there is still insufficient linkage of theory with observed data. We are still operating in the context of discovery and are seeking hypothesis rather than testing specific theoretical formulations. |
