Exam 14: Organizational Culture

Whenever an advertising firm lands a new contract, the successful team rings a loud bell and breaks out a bottle of champagne. In organizational culture, this practice would be considered:

Reality shock occurs on or before the first day of work then quickly subsides.

An organization's culture is usually quite fuzzy and difficult to define using simple models and surveys.

A major consulting firm is offering a special service whereby it is able to determine the organization's dominant culture and some of its subcultures. The firm says that it does this by statistically analyzing the words and phrases in the company's annual reports, news releases, and public speeches by the company's senior executives. The consultancy claims that this is an effective way of identifying the organization's culture because it does not collect any information inside the organization and, consequently, doesn't take time from any employees. Discuss the merits and limitations of this consultancy's ability to determine an organization's culture.

Values represent an important invisible part of an organization's culture.

An organization's culture is defined by its espoused values.

The bicultural audit process consists of three steps.

The most accurate way to determine an organization's culture is by interviewing senior executives about their perceptions of that culture.

The transactional type of psychological contract is primarily a short-term economic exchange.

Shared assumptions are easily uncovered by surveying employees.

Organizational stories support organizational culture by providing social prescriptions of the ways things should or should not be done around the organization.

Employees are more likely to quit if values incongruence is sufficiently low

The deepest element of organizational culture is:

The pre-employment stage of organizational socialization would be more effective if

Subcultures are groups of employees whose values are opposed to the organization's dominant values.

Which part of organizational culture is closest to the "surface" (i.e. observable indicators)?

Using attraction-selection-attrition (ASA) theory, explain how organizations tend to maintain and perpetuate their cultures.

Realistic job previews improve organizational socialization by ensuring that applicants develop more accurate pre-employment expectations.

The assumptions and values that direct everyone in the organization toward the "right way" of doing things are called:

Which of these statements about organizational subcultures is FALSE?