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Four Organizational Culture Types
Bruce M. Tharp, 08 2005
Content:
Organizational categories discussed in the article can be used as a foundation when (re)structuring and identifying an organizational culture.
Organizational behavior:
“The way things are done here” This is the main principle of an organization’s culture, only this is very subjective and therefore hard to define or create an organization’s culture.
Even though a culture is highly subjective and influenced by many controllable and uncontrollable factors it has a deep impact on organizational behavior.
An organization’s culture is determined by many factors, the most important factors are; leadership, orientation / focus (detail, outcome, people or team), market, products and location.
B. Tharp writes about four organizational culture types these types can be used to identify the culture. The 2 dimension method focuses on internal versus external and flexibility versus stability.
I think this approach is very limited in its practical application; in general it is possible to allocate a culture depending on the company profile, market and leadership style. Nevertheless there are so many factors and internal differences which make it really hard to put a company in one of the four ‘boxes’.
A company’s culture is also highly dependent on the industry; working in a highly innovative industry means changes in the market and processes constantly. Employees will be confronted with changes all the time and must be able to adapt to these situations which demands completely different skills when working in a very stable market.
Trends and changes
In history a lot of trends c ...