Summer 2019 TOUR 374-10: Culture Presentation on Stories

This presentation explores the concept of organizational culture, defining it as shared social knowledge that influences employee behavior and attitudes. The presentation focuses on how culture is transmitted, highlighting stories as a potent form of cultural transmission. Stories, including anecdotes, legends, and myths, are used to convey important events, individual actions, and values within an organization. The presentation provides examples of how stories reinforce cultural values, such as the Nike and IBM examples, and emphasizes the importance of stories in shaping employee learning and behavior. The conclusion highlights the importance of transparency and trust in building a strong organizational culture.

ORGANISATION
CULTURE

Organisation Culture
• Organisations have various personalities, which are referred to
as to as “cultures”. Organisation culture is the shared social
knowledge within an enterprise relating to the norms, rules and
values that mould employee behaviour and attitude (Cook &
Yanow, 2011).
• Individual perceive organisational culture based on what they
see, experience, or hear within the organisation. Hence, one can
also called culture a perception.

How Employees Learn
Culture/ How it is
“reinforced”• In various forms, the culture can be transmitted to employees.
However, the most potential types are stories, rituals, material
symbols and Language.
• These are observable artifacts i.e. manifestation of an
organisations culture that employees easily see (Hogan & Coote,
2014).

Number of Forms culture
being transmitted into
employees
How
Employees
Learn Culture/
How it is
“reinforced”
Stories
Material
Symbols
Rituals
Language

Stories – Form of culture
transmission
• As a part of this assignment, Stories is selected as one of the
forms which allow identification of culture among number of
employees.
• In addition, it is cultural transmission – the ability to pass
knowledge on from one individual to another even across
organisation generation.
• It also demonstrates huge importance of culture and
communication in employee learning.

Stories – Form of culture
transmission
• Stories includes anecdotes, legends, accounts, and myths that
are passed down from cohort to cohort within a company (Green,
2013).
• In an organisation, these stories normally cover a description of
major happenings or individual comprising like company founder,
breaking of rule, responses to past mistakes and so on.

Stories and legends
• Social preparation of desired or undesired behaviour.
• Gives a realistic human sides to expectations.
• Most effective stories and legends –
 Describe real people
 Assumed to be true
 Known throughout the organisation
 Are prescriptive

Stories – Form of culture
transmission (Example)
• There are various examples where stories strengthen cultural
values across the company and particularly in positioning new
personnel.
• For case, administrators at Nike believes that stories state about
organisation past help shape the future. Hence, each time it is
possible, corporate “storytellers” (higher managers) describe
about organisation heritage and state stories that celebrate
individuals getting things done.

Stories – Form of culture
transmission (Example)
• Other than this, once a security guard not allow IBM CEO Thomas
Watson to enter into the building as he was entering without the
ID badge. Watson stated “who he was” but the guard contended
that a badge is compulsory to be worn so as to move into
protected area of the structure. At that time, rather that
discipline the guard, Thomas applauded him and used this
experience to state other to preforming their work well.

Stories – Effective form of
culture transmission
• These stories state major examples that individual can gain
learning.
• Such stories are repeatedly filtered with a “cultural network” and
prompt personnel as to “why we do things in a specific way”.
• To assist personnel study the culture, organisational stories
anchor the present in the past, gives out legitimacy and
explanations for existing practices and demonstrate what is
significant to the enterprise.

Conclusion
• Good stories do more than creating a sense of connection. It
developed familiarity and trust and allow individual more open to
learning.
• Hence, from the above discussion, it can be said that in order to
put group of people to accomplish extraordinary goals, an
transparency in culture is required to be built at a level far
beyond resume.

References
■ Cook, S. N., & Yanow, D. (2011). Culture and organizational
learning. Journal of Management Inquiry, 20(4), 362-379.
■ Green, A. (2013). Intergenerational family stories: Private,
parochial, pathological?. Journal of Family History, 38(4), 387-
402.
■ Hogan, S. J., & Coote, L. V. (2014). Organizational culture,
innovation, and performance: A test of Schein's model. Journal of