Literature review

The subject of this literature review is organizational culture and their dimensions. I am going
to talk about what exactly is organizational culture, how it sets cultural differences in
different organizations across countries and what are the dimensions on which these cultural
differences take place.

Organizations are made of people who share common values and have their own ideas and
beliefs of an organization culture therefore, organizational culture consists of shared beliefs,
values, norms and principles which governs how the people in an organization behave and
interact with each other. Practicing different cultures bring the differences in how various
organizations work, survive and make profits. To find a perfect fit between your personality
and an organizations culture is crucial for your happiness and success. Now talking about the
dimensions, reading a few journals and articles regarding organizational culture in different
regions of the world I have mentioned below the most common ones among them all.
1) Open vs Closed system cultures
An open system is where in an organization people are very open to newcomers whereas
in closed systems people are not welcoming to the newcomers and closed even to insider
people. Open systems tend to have approachable people and managers which leads to
higher employee satisfaction.
2) Process oriented vs Results oriented cultures
Process oriented culture focuses on the process and the technical routines that has to be
followed stated by the bureaucrats in the organization. Results oriented culture is focused
on achieving desired results by taking risks and challenging themselves on daily basis. A
result-oriented culture is more effective than process-oriented culture.
3) Tight vs loose culture
In a loose control environment people are more informal towards their work, have more
autonomy and different departments operate without any coordination between
themselves. A tight control culture is often described as close culture environment where
people like to believe in planning which leads to more productivity and people don’t like
surprises and improvising according to that.
4) Local vs professional culture
This dimension represents how employees of an organization identify themselves. In a
local culture employees’ behavior, norms and activities are predictable as they are forced
by social pressure and they also tend to have lower level of diversity. In a professional
culture employee tend to identify themselves solely with their profession or content of the
work.
5) Employee oriented vs Job oriented culture
In this dimension an organization is distinguished by preference of their culture whether it
is on job or their employees. In an employee-oriented culture emphasis is given on not
only on the employees work but their personal problems also, where the managers
sympathies with its workers. In a job-oriented culture, the only focus is on the job well
done and not on employees work satisfaction where a company can lose its employees
very quickly.
 6) Internally vs externally driven culture
In an internally driven culture company focuses more following their own plans and
procedures and usually think that they know what is best for their customers. On the other
hand, in an eternally driven culture the employees are very customer oriented and meeting
customer needs is very important to them.

Conclusion

If you want to start an organization and think which culture is best suited for you, in my
opinion it is very important to know that these dimensions of cultures are neither good nor
bad. We have to understand that cultures can’t be created individually it is a collective
phenomenon where accepting each other’s values, beliefs and norms is very important. With
practising different cultures there can be different problems for example, when an
organization culture is inappropriate with its goal or when group of employees do not interact
well with each other in their environment. Dysfunction can be caused on either end of the
spectrum by giving too much emphasis on any of these cultures.

References

Hofstede, G. (1994). The business of international business is culture. International Business

Review, 3(1), 1-14. Doi: 10.1016/0969-5931(94)90011-6

Zeqiri, Jusuf & Alija, Shpresa. (2016). The Organizational Culture Dimensions – The Case of
an Independent Private University in Macedonia. 61. 10.1515/subboec-2016-0002.

6 Dimensions of Organizational Culture - Which One is Right for You? (2019, January 15).
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