COURSE: MAED

SUBJECT: Human Behavior

INSTRUCTOR: Prof. Merlin T. Pabellan

NAME: John Mechael F. Baynosa

TOPIC: Creating and sustaining Culture and How Employees Learn

Culture?

Creating and sustaining Culture

Cultures are a combination of shared values, beliefs, characteristics,
capabilities, reinforcing stories, and behaviors that shape what and why
people do what they do. To some organizations, culture was never an
external element of their safety program; it was always an integral
component.

How a culture begins?

This leads us to the ultimate source of an organization’s culture:

its founders.

Major impact of a founder in a culture

1. They have a vision of what the organization should be. They are
unconstrained by previous customs or ideologies.
2. The small size that typically characterizes new organization further
facilitates the founders’ imposition of their vision on all organizational
members.

Culture creation occurs in many ways

1. First founders hire and keep only employees who think and feel the
same way they do.
2. Second they indoctrinate and socialize these employees to their way
of thinking and feeling.
3. And finally, the founders own behavior act as a role model that
encourages employees to identify with them and thereby internalize
their beliefs, values and assumptions.
Keeping a culture Alive:

Three forces play a particularly important part in sustaining a culture

1. Selection practices,
 The explicit goal of the selection process is to identify and hire
individuals who have the knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform
the jobs within the organization successfully.
2. the actions of top management
 The results will be the hiring of people who have values essentially
consistent with those of the organizations or at least a good portion of
those values.
3. and socialization methods
 Candidates learn about the organization and if they perceive a
conflict between their values and those of the organization they can
self select themselves out of the applicant pool.

How Employees Learn Culture?

Culture is transmitted to employees in stories, rituals and language.

Factors that affect culture

Stories such as these circulate through many organizations. They typically

contain a narrative of events about the organization’s founders, rule
breaking, rags-to-riches successes, reduction in the workforce, relocation
of employees, reactions to past mistakes, and organizational coping.

Rituals are repetitive sequences of activities that express and reinforce the
key values of the organization — what goals are most important which
people are important, and which people are expendable.

Language

Many organizations and units within organizations use language as a way

to identify members of culture or subculture. By learning this language,
members attest their acceptance of the culture and, in so doing help to
preserve it.

“The most complex thing in this world is the most simple

-unknown

Reference: more at http://www.citeman.com/4003-how-employees-learn-culture-2.html#ixzz396vMkvDa