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Examples Of Assessing Organizational Culture

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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 …show more content…

The medical field brings together a vast array of individuals from different backgrounds and cultures. But once they become a doctor, hospital nurse, surgical technician, etc., they take on a new life and thereby absorb a new culture into their lives. Subcultures, as defined by organizational theorists John van Maanen and Stephen Barley, are “a subset of an organization’s members who interact regularly with one another, identify themselves as a distinct group…and routinely take action on the basis of collective understandings unique to the group” (Cheney, 2011, 78-79)
The organizational culture in a hospital is based on the premise that the hospital is there to provide a place for the care and healing of the sick or injured. Organizational theorist Mary Jo Hatch puts forth that there are five (5) “Degrees of Cultural Integration and Differentiation” (Cheney, 77) identified as follows: Unitary, Diverse (Integrated), Diverse (Differentiated), Diverse (Fragmented) and Disorganized (Multi-cephalous) (Hatch, 1997, 210). A hospital in its purest form would be well represented as a Unitary culture because the staff as a whole all have the same values or beliefs. But individual staff or even medical units may fall into any of the other cultures identified as well. A particular unit, i.e. a cardiac telemetry floor, may be a Diverse (Fragmented) unit due to a group of nurses who do not view their critical task requirements in the same way and as a

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