1.

How would you respond to someone who made the following statement “ Organizational culture
is not important as far as managers are concerned.” Explain

Ans: I do not agree with the statement that ‘organizational culture is not important as far as managers are
concerned.” Because despite the position he/she holds, they are still the member of the organization, and
they are the one who guides, motivates and influence the rest of the employee, and if they themselves do
not follow the organizational culture, how would they influence and expects others to follow the culture.
And for any good manager he/ she is expected to the proficient in their role, be it task role, informational
role or interpersonal role and people(employee) look for the inspiration from their manager because they
are good on all their roles,

Organizational culture is defined as the values, beliefs assumptions, communication that influences
unique social and psychological environment, that overall gives definite shape to the setting of the
organization

Culture also includes the organization’s vision, values, norms, systems, symbols, language, assumptions,
beliefs, and habits (Needle, 2004).

For a manager organizational culture works as a guideline, monitor and influence the behavior of their
employee:

Manager can act as discipliner: office culture will help a manager to act as a disciplinarian and correct the
inappropriate behavior of the employee. But over time correcting or punishing employee for their
unwanted office behavior has changed, in modern days managers are not allowed to be harsh with their
punishment, because this will jeopardize the relationship between managers and employee. They are now
expected to act more as influencer who motivates their employee to maintain certain level of discipline in
the organization.

Interaction With Employees: Conversely, an organization with a distributed leadership culture where each
employee takes part in a company's business strategy may install managers in roles indistinguishable from
floor-level employees A distributed leadership culture allows managers to build better working
relationships with employees while still supervising employee performance and reporting to company
owners.

Setting the Example: Regardless of the organizational culture, a manager must serve as the model for that
culture for other employees to emulate. Since the culture of a business may shift over time, this also
requires a manager to be versatile and easily adaptable to change. The quicker a manager can illustrate the
proper model of a company's desired culture, the faster employees will adopt it.

Rewarding Proper Behavior: A manager's role within a small business' culture may require her to reward
employees who properly display the company's desired qualities. Rewarding employees for perpetuating
proper organizational culture shows workers that owners and management value each worker's place in
the company and are serious about maintaining standards.
 2. How would you define the functions of organizational culture? What are the various
manifestations of organizational culture?

1. The first function of culture is that it has a Boundary-Defining role which means that culture helps to
create distinctions between one organisation and others.

2. Culture helps to create a sense of identity for the organisation members.

3. Culture facilitates the generation of commitment to something larger the than one’s individual self-
interest. Culture encourages the members of the organisation to give priority to organisational interests
over and above their personal interests.

4. Culture enhances the Social System Stability. Culture is also known as the social glue that helps to hold
the organisation together by providing appropriate standards for what employees should say and do. It
provides a list of social do’s and don’ts for the employees.

5. Culture finally, serves as a sense making and control mechanism that guides and shapes the attitudes
and behaviours of employees. This function is particularly important in the study of organisational
behaviour. Every organisation has its own set of assumptions, understandings and implicit rules to guide
the day to day behaviour of the employees. The newcomers will be accepted as fully-fledged members of
the organisation only when they learn to obey these rules. Conformity to the rules is generally the primary
basis for rewards and promotions.

Thus, culture is beneficial to the organisation as it enhances organisational commitment and increases the
consistency of employee behaviour. Culture is beneficial to the employee also as it reduces ambiguity.
Employees become very clear as to how things are to be done and what is more important for the
organisation.

Various manifestation of organizational culture:

1. Artifacts: They are the visible aspects of culture and has some physical shape, however its
perception differs from person to persons, such as ritual and ceremonies symbol and slogans,
stories etc.

2. Values: they are the conscious and affective desires of the organization, something they would
like to promote or reward. Most of the time organization tries to sell or promote its cultural values
through slogans or stories, however the true values of any organization can be tested through
collective opinion about the experience of the values of the employees. And these can be tested
through two different criteria,
 Commitment: an organization can view its employees as a resources who will be used to perform
the activities or it can see them as a long term relationship, and it shows the commitment of the
organization towards its employee. Some example are maternity leave, life work balance etc.

Career: the values of the organization can also be reflected through organization’s drive to
develop the growth of its employees. Many companies organize different type of the training and
career development program to develop the employee’s career.

3. Empowerment: The social culture and organization structure can also be influenced by the
amount of employee empowerment. Such as the decisional freedom they get from their
subordinates, involvement in decision making process and the level of responsibility they have.

4. Assumption: the assumption governs how an employee determines the right behavior and feels
his job and career, how the culture operates within the organizational system.

3. Using Hofstede’s cultural dimension framework (attached herewith), how would you describe the
culture of your present organization? Explain. Those who are not currently employed, using
Hofstede’s cultural dimension framework, how would you describe the culture of your OBL
Classroom?

I. Power Distance: The organization I m working for follows flattened hierarchy system, with
certain level of restriction, specially when transferring information. We are free to express our
opinion and feedbacks, but it does require evidence. Even though information and freely passed
both upward and downward, line managers usually filters the messages based on importance and
requirement.
II. Individualism: Since I work in a service industry most of our goal are common, that is to achieve
the target by providing the best possible service to the customers. And that requires a team work,
where an individual is expected to showcase his/ her special attributes but by working within a
team.
III. Masculinity: There is no such stereotyping thinking that separates male and female in different
work dimension. Everybody either a girl or a guy are free to express their thoughts and feedbacks
and are rewarded on the basis of his/ her performance.
IV. Uncertainty avoidance: since it’s a service industry the business/ market is always fluctuating,
and many times changes the short- term goal of the organization, so nothing in such industry is
fixed, which means the culture of the organization can change any minute, so people(employee)
are mostly ready with all sort of changes that occurs. It does that few days to adapt the situation
completely but at the end everybody adapts and move on with unique environment.
V. Long Term Orientation: with changes in time the degree of long term orientation is also
decreasing. People these days tends move quickly if only they feel that the company is not
responding well with their hard work and diligence. Since the structure of the organization is
getting flatter and flatter every day, employee these days expects to get involved in decision
making, and if the company fails to do so, they easily move out.
 4. How are you contributing to the making of OBL classroom culture and how are you being
impacted from it?

Being the operative and having responsibilities to govern and administer the daily work of the
organization, culture has always been very important for me. Culture is the everyday reality of
organizational life. Culture is what we do, the way we behave, the way we treat each other, our products,
our customers, our community and ourselves. To contribute the making of this culture various ways has
been developed to embed the culture among the employees:
i. Learning the culture:
The people in the organization come from various cultural backgrounds. As such it is a very
essential part to learn how things are done around in the organization. For this the organization
provides with brief informal orientation and training session where they are told about the
schedules, working shifts, other employee with whom they are going to work with, different
reward methods, leave application, how to communicate with the customers, hiring process,
bonuses.

ii. Documenting:
Documenting helps to define the culture of the organization in a more formal way. It helps to take
the decision during conflicts.

iii. Measuring and rewarding:

The key element of the desired culture is written down so that it helps to measure the
performance of the employees and reward accordingly. Cash rewards and recognition both are
used as a reward.

iv. Handling cultural gaps:

There is a vast cultural gap existing in the organization, as there are employees working together
from all over Nepal. As such sometime problems do exist. But then with communication and
discussion these problems are solved. The impact of this is high on the upper management, as
they are the ones who have set the norms and culture in the organization.

5. How is your OBL Instructor contributing to the making of OBL classroom culture and how is he being
impacted from it?

In a classroom culture, instructor is often viewed as a manager. He is responsible for managing the
students that come from different society; social values and foundation. There are several dimensions
which are applied by our instructor in making OBL classroom culture:

i. Stability:
Our instructor continuously tries to increase the knowledge by teaching and providing with
practical OBL tests that are relevant in any organizational setting.

ii. Aggressiveness:
He encourages students to be competitive and perform well.

iii. Innovation and risk taking:

He encourages students to be more innovative and also encourages taking risk as and when
required.
 iv. Attention to detail:
All the course materials are talked about in detail and good analysis for each topic is provided.
Also students are encouraged to provide with their analysis so that there is a room for open
discussion.

v. Outcome orientation:
Our instructor focuses on the way he teaches so that students could learn as much as possible
from the classroom experience.

Our OBL instructor is being impacted by:

 The difference in culture from where students belong. With the difference in culture distance of
power is very high. Our instructor tries to create classroom where he seeks to cover aspects of
different culture. Also he creates such environment where individuals are willing to reach out and
meet on the common ground that is shared as human beings.