Organizational Culture and Change - Literature review Example

It is worth emphasizing that organizational changes are those changes that affect the running of the organization from its administrative to day to day running. Organizational culture also refers to "a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration” (Schein, 1992, p. 12). Because organizational culture is described by Schein (1992) to be a pattern, any significant change within the organization distorts the pattern.

In the given organization, the kind of change that took place was a recruitment and placement change, which was necessitated by the fact that there had been an internal promotional process within the organization. In the given instance, it was clearly witnessed that the organizational change had a great influence on the organizational culture and the entire organizational climate. This is because the new employees who were introduced needed some time to fit into the culture that they came to meet.

Some way and somehow, they were also trying to influence the existing culture with their own versions of organizational processes from the places they worked before. This brought about a distorted organizational culture for a while. In such a situation, it is important that an orientation program that seeks to equip newcomers with the existing culture is relevant (Al-Ghorfa, 2009). This is because an absence of such culture could lead to a situation whereby an entirely new culture would have to be created and this could be devastating for customers especially as the existing customers may not easily get adapted to them.