Week 4 Organisation Culture

1.Provide some examples of the ‘visible’ aspects of culture in an organisation of your choice – what are some hidden aspects? To gain this information use your own work experience or base it on a company you visited within The Eden Centre as part of the lecture.

In different countries have different culture and that goes for the same in companies.
The organisation that I have chosen is Beaver Brooks. The culture in there is relaxed and basically staff enjoy the working environment.
In Beaver Brooks there are two features which are visible and hidden. Visible features are things that anyone can see even customers, for example: uniform, shop floor space, working culture – communication and language style.
The hidden culture is behind the shop floor, for example training – team building exercise and how staff communicates to the head office.
Beaver Brooks is still family owned and they have just celebrated their 90th anniversary. Over the years Beaver Brooks has won numbers of awards and they are well recognised in their own field.
According to one of the managing directors their culture is based on creating a positive and caring culture and this makes their colleagues feel that they are being listened to and their opinions have been taken in to accounts and they are delighted to have achieved these honours.

2.Explain what Handy meant by the following in your own words:
 A power culture
 A role culture
 A task culture
 A person culture

with an organisational example of each

Charles Handy’s theory is one of the best known in is field and it has identified different cultures in different companies.
Here are the brief explanations for different culture that you can see in a company.

Power culture according to Charles Handy is based on family owned businesses for example Beaver Brooks, John Lewis and solo traders. All these companies are still family owned businesses. This suggests that all the important decisions are made by probably one person.

Role culture is based on rules and procedure. This is mainly used in large organisations and everyone knows their tasks, for example factory workers they will be told what to do and how.

Task culture is based on team work from different departments. This type of culture is more like a team work based and staff have different tasks to complete for example in Siemens the Research and Development Department and Marketing Department work together to design new technology that customers will wants. They will be given different tasks to complete, for example in the Marketing Department they will gather all the information on the customers’ needs and wants and the R and D Department will try to make it. This can also motivate their staff because they will have the chance to work with other departments of staff and it can make them feel they are not trapped in one department.
They have one goal in common which is to improve the company processes for that I meant communication, relationship between different department and market shares.

Person culture – you can usually find it in creative companies, for example advertising companies, for example Boost Marketing. This allows every person to come up and express their ideas and get involved in making decisions.
When staff are planning draft ideas every member of staff will come together and shows areas that they are good at, for example coming up with new ideas for slogans, and the other member of staff is good at creative drawings and every member has one goal is to satisfy their clients.




http://www.lindsay-sherwin.co.uk/guide_managing_change/html_overview/05_culture_handy.htm


3. What do you think are the problems of trying to classify culture into one of the four types described above?

Overall every company uses more than one style to keep the company going because in different departments or situations the theory may not work so they will need to merge different theories together and finding new ways to solve different situations.
Each classify culture does not give the full picture of organisation because in one organisations can fit in to different cultures e.g. by departments.

4. Provide a link within your blog to a company or organisation which you feel demonstrates a strong culture. Explain why you have chosen this company.

Beaver Brooks
The reason why in have chosen Beaver Brooks is because when I walked into the shop floor the atmosphere was very comfortable and the staff was very friendly and polite. There visual culture was very well presented and their staff was well knowledge in the products that they are selling.



5.Remember to end this topic with a summary of your findings in a conclusion and evaluation.

In this conclusion every company have different culture and member of staff is different from each other for example personality. Just by investigating the company culture does not give a clear picture of the company because there is hidden culture that not everyone is able to see.
Also in Charles Handy’s theory and other theories does not show all the aspect of the company because nowadays company uses mixture of styles to motivate their staff.


Bibliography and References

Beaver brooks the jewellers (n.d) About us [online] Available at: http://www.beaverbrooks.co.uk/index.cfm?event=showAboutUs
[Accessed 29 October 2009]

Free management library (2000) Organisational culture [online] Available at: http://managementhelp.org/org_thry/culture/culture.htm [Accessed 29 October 2009]