Assessing Organizational Culture - Essay

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Assessing Organizational Culture 1
Running head: ASSESSING ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

Assessing Organizational Culture

BADM 6123, Master in Business Administration – Health Care
Southern Nazarene University
Dr. Liesa Persaud

Rick Lawrence
March 31, 2012

Assessing Organizational Culture 2 Almost every organization, whether public or private, on paper or in practice, has a culture that fairly dictates its everyday functioning. The term culture has many
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Social psychologist Edgar Schein formulated a theoretical model that shows an organization’s culture is built on three levels: artifacts, values and norms, and assumptions and beliefs. Artifacts are usually the most common and visible sign of a specific culture. Schein puts forth that things such as nursing uniforms, terminology, surgical protocols and more, actually and accurately represent the basic aspects of organization’s culture. The values and norms aspect of his theory, while not always visible, can be seen through behavior of the individual or group; it reveals what is important to the group and how they treat each other within their organization. Each aspect of the profession may have an operating procedure or environment unique to that area of specialization, but still have the same values and norms for their actions. In a surgical room, sterilization of the environment is much more important than it would be in a patient’s room on a medical/surgical floor, but they still have the same belief in keeping an open wound as clean as possible. While values in the medical profession do not vary as a whole, values do define accepted behavior and action.
Genuine assumptions and beliefs are nurtured by a persons or organizations values and