OCS Cultural Analysis

Kaytlin Kieklak

November 7 , 2019

Introduction
The Humane Society of Summit County (HSSC) is a non-profit organization that offers shelter to
care for the abused, neglected, and abandoned animals of Summit County in hopes to find the
animals a loving family. The organization has a good amount of symbol, talk, and artifacts to
incorporate the culture approach.

Cultural Analysis

1. Practices are the everyday behaviors that enable members to accomplish the process or
organizing and enacts the organizational culture. From a cultural perspective, a focus on
such practices provides insight into the routine features of everyday organizational life.
For example, a meeting is not only a significant organizational construct but also a set of
practices in which member must engage in order to accomplish organizational business
(Mumby, p. 146). Vocabulary is the use of a specific jargon that is exclusive to members.
Jargon frequently serves as a “badge” signifying membership of the culture, and anyone
who does not know the jargon can be considered an outsider. An example of vocabulary
being used in such a way would be how firefighters use the word “shitbum” to describe
indigents who make 911 calls and “shitbox” to describe the ambulance that takes the
“shitbums” to the emergency room. (Mumby, p. 146). Metaphors are the understanding
and experiencing of one kind of thing in terms of another. Organizational cultures can be
experiences as families, teams, or machines. By studying organizational metaphors,
culture researchers can develop some important insight into how organization members
make sense of their organization. A good example of how metaphor analysis can provide
such insight is the study of bullying. Through interviews and focus group meetings with
targets of workplace bullying, the study analyzes victims’ efforts to make sense of the
painful experience of being bullied (Mumby, p. 147).

2. A story about my organization (The Humane Society) is one to make you remember how
important it is to remember that “there is no I in team”. One of the volunteers at the
shelter is named Shelby. She often sees our assignment boards for the day and tends to
blow off her assignments because she does not want to clean the cages or the halls. Since
we do work as a family, we would often take over her jobs if we saw that they were not
done to be able to continue on with our day and so that our boss would not yell at us for
the cages being not up to par. All of the volunteers came to an agreement that we would
no longer be doing Shelby’s work because she was always getting credit for the extra
work that we would all do. After one week, the cages that were assigned to Shelby were
in the worst condition I have ever seen at the Humane Society. We had a meeting held
and all the volunteers were yelled at because of the work that Shelby did not do. We
explained what happened to our director and Shelby was asked to no longer be a part of
the team once it was brought to our his attention. The reason I used this story to represent
the sense-making devices for the organizational members is because it shows how we all
have the same morals. We want what is best for the animals and want to keep them happy
and healthy, but we are unable to do so if the people working for the company do not
have the same intentions for their animals as well.
 3. The first function that The Humane Society follows is “creating a shared identity
amongst organization members.” As stated previously, all of our group members were
held accountable for the dirty halls and cages that Shelby was assigned to do (it
eventually got so bad that we realized that being yelled at once in order to get someone
who does not have the same passion was well worth it). This example plays perfectly into
this function because we all share the same vision of the organization and share the same
overall beliefs and values (Mumby, p. 138). There was one point where our organization
managed to have no dogs for a day because we had a huge adoption weekend and made
sure that all the animals were up to date with vet visits and they were all adopted, which
has never happened before. We were all rewarded with free food and a day off which
plays into the next function. The Humane Society also generates employee commitment
to the organization. If anyone needs a shift taken or gets assigned more work than they
can handle someone else from the volunteer group will step in and take their shift or be
more than happy to offer assistance to an overbooked employee. The Humane Society
runs like a family, not the type of family that does not communicate and fights all the
time, but an actual loving family which is incredible to be a part of. We all have a shared
identity and we are highly committed to the organization which is a key part in this
function (Mumby, p.138).

4. The first piece of advice I would offer would be to not hide anything from employees or
volunteers. I often walk past our office workers and they will be deep in conversation
about either a situation happening with the organization, talking about what they did over
the weekend, or even discussing what they ate for lunch and they refuse to include me in
the conversation. I think this is because I am not an employee, and just a volunteer
worker, they feel as if they have more power over me which they do not. The bad thing is
that that type of behavior will eventually start to form barriers within the organization and
any type of split like that amongst the team will only cause more problems. I would also
give this piece of advice: for the CEO’s; get to know your workers. Very rarely have we
had the chance to meet one of the owners of the Humane Society of Summit County. All
of the people who work together on a daily basis are all very close but the owner, the
same one who preaches “get to know one another,” does not know any of us.

Conclusion

Although there are some areas where my organization can improve, I have been given an
incredible opportunity to be able to work with such amazing people who care so much about
other beings. If my readers could take anything away from this is that good organizations work
in groups and they work together; it takes time to get to where you may want an organization to
be but with hard work and dedication it can come together.