Introduction
Culture is a design for living, way of life, sharing meaning, guidelines of action, common perception, and configuration of learned behaviour, collection of ideas and habits and many more. In this regard, R. Tylor defines, “culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, norms, beliefs, art, morals, law, customs & other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society. “Culture is an anthropological term. It represents a pattern of beliefs & behaviours that have been learned from other members of society. It is acquired through social learning cultivated behaviours. In a broad sense culture is a symbolic integration of individual behaviours in a supra system, every culture has sub-culture as every system has a subsystem.
There is a relationship between culture and education. Education always preserves and promotes cultural heritage. Education promotes social interaction through which students acquire the culture of the group. Education transmits culture. Cultural adoption goes along with educational change. Culture is the practical aspect of education. Culture is the major source of curriculum. Culture determines the nature of education, in this respect, Emile Durkheim says, “Education is the action exercised by the generation of adults on those who are not ready for social life.” Organizational culture is a system of several meaning held by members that distinguished the organization from other organizations. Organizational culture is an idea in the field of organizational studies and management, which describes the psychology, attitudes, experiences, belief and values of an organization. Organization culture is a system of shared meaning within an organization that determines, to a large degree, what employees see and how they act and respond to their world. It is the specific collection of values and norms that are shared by people and groups in an organization and that control the way they interact with each other and with stakeholders outside the organization.
Edgar Schein, professor of MIT Sloan School of Management, defines organizational culture as: “A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way you perceive, think, & feel in relation to those problems.”
When students join schools and colleges they bring with them the values & beliefs that they have been taught at their family. Therefore, students always reproduce home culture at college, which a teacher intends to change as given curricula. In this regard, school culture always seems a resistant factor in students’ growth & development. It also happens for all employees in educational organization. To overcome the problems and minimize the gap created by school & home culture. Organizational culture must be understood.
- Primary Characteristics of an organization culture
According to S.P. Robbins et al, the ten characteristics of organizational culture are:
- Member identity: the degree to which employees identify with the organization as a whole rather than with their type of job or field of professional expertise.
- Group Emphasis: the degree to which work activities are organized around groups rather than individuals.
- People focus the degree to which the management decisions take into consideration the effect of outcomes on people within the organization.
- Unit integration: the degree to which units within the organization are encouraged to operate in a coordinated or interdependent manner.
- Control: the degree to which rules, regulations, & direct supervision are used to oversee and control employee behaviour.
- Risk tolerance: the degree to which employees are encouraged to be aggressive, innovative, and risk-seeking.
- Reward Criteria: the degree to which rewards such as salary increases and promotions are allocated on employee performance criteria in contrast to seniority, favouritism, or other non-performance factors.
- Conflict tolerance: the degree to which employees are encouraged to air conflicts and criticisms openly.
- Means-end orientation: the degree to which management focuses on results or outcomes rather than on the techniques and processes used to achieve those outcomes.
- Open-Systems focus: the degree to which the organization monitors and responds to changes in the external environments.
Organizational culture is pervasive and operates unconsciously. It helps employees understand organizational events and in the sense-making process. The characteristics of the organizational culture of an educational enterprise are as mentioned below:
- It focuses on the value and beliefs of members of organizations. “Shared values, shared beliefs, shared meaning, shared understanding, & shared sense-making are all different ways of describing culture. These patterns of understanding also provide a basis for making one is own behaviour sensible and meaningful”
- The cultural model focuses on the notion of a single or dominant culture in organizations but this does not necessarily mean that individual values are always in harmony with one another. “There may be different and competing value systems that create a mosaic of organizational realities rather than a uniforms corporate culture. “Large, multipurpose organizations, in particular, are likely to have more than one culture.
- The organizational culture emphasizes the development of shared norms and meanings. The assumption is that interaction between members of the organization, or its subgroups, eventually leads to behavioural norms that gradually become cultural features of the school or college.
- These group norms sometimes allow the development of a monoculture in a school with meanings shared throughout the staff- “the way we do things around here.” We have already noted, however, that there may be several subcultures based on the professional and personal interests of different groups. These typically have internal coherence but experience difficulty in relationships with other groups whose behavioural norms are different.
- Culture is typically expressed through rituals and ceremonies, which are used to support and celebrate beliefs & norms. Schools are rich in such symbols as assembled, prize-giving & corporate worship. “Symbols are central to the process of constructing meaning.
- Organizational culture assumes the existence of heroes & the heroines who embody the values and beliefs of the organization. These honoured members typify the behaviours associated with the culture of the institution.
Campbell Evans(1993) stresses that heroes or heroines are those whose achievements match the culture. “Choice and recognition of heroes occur within the cultural boundaries identified through the value filter. The accomplishments of those individuals who come to be regarded as heroes are compatible with the cultural emphasis”.
- Functions of culture:
Culture by definition is a notion. i.e. elusive, intangible, implicit and taken for granted. However, every organization develops a core set of assumptions, understandings, & implicit rules that govern recurrent activities in the organization. It is said that culture defines the rules of the games. In this regard, culture performs a number of functions within an organization, such as:
- It has a boundary – defining role: that is, it creates distinctions between one organization & others.
- It conveys a sense of identity for organization members.
- Culture facilitates the generation of commitment to something larger than one’s individual self-interest.
- It enhances the stability of the social system. Culture is the social glue that helps hold the organization together by providing appropriate standards for what employee should say and do.
- Culture serves as a sense-making & control mechanism that guides & shapes the attitudes & behaviour of employees.
The role of culture influencing employee’s behaviour appears to be increasingly important in today’s workplace. As organizations have widened spans of control, flattened structures, introduced items, reduced formalization, & empowered employees, the shared meaning provided by a strong culture ensures that everyone is pointed in the same direction.
- Creating & sustaining the culture
An organization’s culture is not the bubbles of water that go off frequently. In seldom changes. It cannot be changed forcefully as it cannot be established easily. It is quite interesting that culture never created and reinforced in a planned way rather it begins through a positive practice in an automatic manner.
However, culture creation occurs in the following three ways:
Founders hire & keep only employees who think & feel the same way they do.
They indoctrinate and socialize these employees to their way of thinking & feeling.
The founder’s own behaviours act as a role model that encourages employees to identify with them and thereby internalize their beliefs, values and assumptions.
To keep the culture alive the recruitment, selection and appointment process, performance evaluation criteria, promotion procedures, training and development activities should be free from any kind of external interventions. In this respect, reward those who support it, & penalize those who challenge it.
The following three forces play a particularly important role in sustaining a culture (Ibid):
- Selection practices
In every organisation, selection process provides information to application about the organization. It helps candidates to learn about the organization. For example, students seeking post-SLC education can learn the selection process of various colleges for their choice by looking its prospectus, brochures, advertisement and through personal contact as well. If the students perceive a conflict between their values appears to be a mismatch with the organizational values then the organisational culture will not be sustained. Therefore, an organization must consider the core values of the selection process in order to sustain its culture.
- The actions of top management & the actions of top-level management also have a major impact on the organisation’s culture. In every organization, the senior executive establishes norms first and then filter down towards the bottom. What the seniors do & behave affects the junior’s behaviour. For example, students learn teacher style of salutation; dress up simplicity through hidden curricula.
- Socialization methods
No matter how good a job the organization does in recruiting and selection, new employees are not fully indoctrinated in the organization’s culture. Because they are unfamiliar with the organization’s culture, new employees are potentially likely to disturb the belief and customs that are in place. The organization will, therefore, want to help new employee adapt to its culture. This adaptation process is called socialization.
Socialization is the process of adaptation of adjustment or assimilation of the new employees in the organization. The socialization can be conceptualized as a process made up of three stages namely.
- Pre-arrival stage
This is the period of learning in the socialization process that occurs before a new employee joins the organization. The pre-arrival stage explicitly recognizes that each individual arrives with a set of values, attitudes and expectations for instance, in many jobs, particularly professional work, new members will have undergone a considerable degree of prior socialization in training and in school. For example 3 years B.Ed. students take microteaching at their college as a process of socialization on their practice teaching, which is the first stage of socialization.
- Encounter stage
The first entry of the employee into the organization is the encounter stage. This is the stage of the socialization process in which, a new employee sees what the organization is really like and confronts the possibilities that expectations and reality may diverge. In this stage, there is a possibility of a confrontation between expectation and reality.
Where expectation & reality differ, the new employee must undergo socialization that will detach his/her from previous assumptions & replace them with another set that the organization deems desirable.
- Metamorphosis stage
- This is the stage of change in which, a new employee changes and adjusts to the job, work, group & organization
- Learning of culture by teachers
As we know, culture is a learned behaviour, it is learned through different events, materials, relationship etc. It is transmitted to employees in a number of forms, the most potent being stories, rituals, material symbols, and language. A story typically contains a narrative of events and relationships of characters. Moreover, the stories anchor the present in the past and provide explanations and legitimacy for current practices.
Rituals are repetitive sequences of activities that express and reinforce the key values of the organization-which goals and people are important and which are expendable. Teachers also learn the culture of the students and school through material symbols such as dress up, room decoration, furnishing, classroom size, seat arrangement, teaching materials, facilities available, wall-mounted posters, etc. observing such symbols a teacher can change his/her perceptions, openness in values, creativity and flexibility, etc.
These material symbols convey to teachers who are important, the kinds of behaviour eg. Participatory or authoritative, social or individualistic etc. when a new teacher enters into the educational institutions the teacher becomes overwhelmed with lingual difficulties. Eg. Jargons and acronyms. Language is another major factor through which a teacher learns the student’s culture. Language, especially local language help teacher to create an ethical culture. The strong organizational culture is very much helpful to create such a culture.
An ethical culture can be created in the following ways:
Being a visible role model, if the senior teachers seem as taking the ethical high road, it provides a positive message for the students.
Communicating ethical expectations: using elaborated and restricted codes, creating and disseminating organizational code of conducts or ethics, a teacher can create an ethical culture in the classroom.
Providing ethical training: Conducting seminars, workshops and ethical training programmes, a teacher can address the possible ethical dilemmas.
- Impact of culture on Teacher’s Performance and Satisfaction
Employees from an overall subjective perception of the organization based on factors such as degree of risk tolerance, team emphasis, and support of people. This overall perception becomes, in effect, the organization’s culture or personality. These favourable or unfavourable perceptions then affect teachers’ performance and satisfaction, with the impact being greater for stronger cultures.
A strong corporate culture is said to be good for organizational development. Such culture is deeply embedded form of social control that influences employee decisions and behaviour. It is like social glue that binds people together and makes them feel part of the organizational experience.
An organizational culture assumes that a strong culture is better than a weak one. A strong organizational culture exists when most employees across all subunits hold the dominant values. Strong culture increases organizational performance only when the cultural content is appropriate for the organization’s environment.
So for, we have argued that a strong culture is more appropriate for organizational development when cultural values are aligned with the organization’s environment. Similarly, organizations are more likely to succeed when they have an adaptive culture.
An adaptive culture exists when employees focus on the changing needs of customers & other stakeholders, & support initiatives to keep pace with these changes. An adaptive culture has major characteristics, which are given below:
- Adaptive cultures have external focus:
It believes that changes are both necessary & inevitable to keep pace with a changing external environment.
- Adaptive cultures pay much attention to organizational processes as they do to organizational goals:
Employees engage in continuous improvement of internal processes to serve external stakeholders.
- Employees in adaptive cultures have a strong sense of ownership:
In this culture, employees believe that “it’s our job”.
- Adaptive cultures are proactive & quick:
Employees themselves seek out opportunities, rather than wait for them to arrive. They act quickly to learn through discovery rather than engage in paralysis by analysis.
To sum up, in educational enterprise particularly in school & college situation, a strong & adaptive culture should be undertaken in order to institutionalize students needs & teacher’s satisfaction in the changed context. In this respect, educational institutions should always keep a balance between external & internal culture.
References:
- Robbins, S.P. (2005). Organizational Behaviour, New Delhi: Prentice-Hall
- Morgan G. 91997), Images of organization. California: Saga Publication, New bury Park.
- Schein, E. (1997). Organizational Culture & Leadership. San Francisco, Jossey Bass
- Hoyle, E. (1986). The politics of school Management, Sevenoaks” Hodder & Stoughton.
- Bush, T (1995). Theories of Educational Management. London: Paul Chapman Publishing Limited, of sage publications co.
- Mcshane, Steven L: Glinow, Marry Annevon (2003) Organizational Behaviour: Emerging Realities for the Workplace Revolution. New Delhi Tata McGraw-Hill
Samir Parajuli
Teacher