The Importance Of Organizational Culture

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An organizational culture can be defined as the total sum of its norms, values, accepted behaviors, virtues, and the political atmosphere in which it operate its business (Kanungo et al., 2001). Organizational culture is something that is not static, it changes as time passes and these changes can be seen within and out of the organizations. This has made it such that to better understand the definition of organizational culture it is good to look at it from the standpoint of its relevant organizational goals. The organizational culture differs from one organization to another whereby, one organization’s culture can be to sustain customer-focus, while another can be to uphold honesty. Other types of cultures can be namely: supportive, innovative,…show more content…
This means that a public sector unit (PSU) should not pick up an IT strategy to the detriment of its cherished organizational culture. Before a PSU pick up an IT strategy, it is paramount that it takes due consideration on the organization’s already existing cultures when deciding on how to implement this new IT strategy into the unit. The CIO in the PSU have to ensure that, the strategy is in alignment with the organization’s culture. This is because, the PSU IT history is embedded into its organizational culture. So, if this strategy does not align with the organizational culture, the goals of that strategy will not be achieved since organizational culture has the capability to influence any organizational process that is related to the IT development project such as its management and implementation (Kaarst-Brown, 2008). The consequences of not taking into consideration organizational culture before implementing a new IT strategy into a PSU are grave such that; Ignoring culture can lead to attrition of key workers, inhibit creativity and productivity, and cause increasing issues of trust within the PSU. For example, if the IT strategy is to implement softwares that can monitor employees activities in the unit, this is an indication that, the PSU does not trust its employees and to sustain a healthy organizational culture there have to be trust and loyalty between the employees and their employer. In effect, the PSU can enhance its organizational culture, by instead increasing the time allocated for the process of hiring an employee or even try to inform the employees in the unit that this new technology will monitor their performance. By doing so, it will help to reduce the negative impacts that the issue of distrust can cause on the PSU cherished organizational culture. Another example can also be that, if the PSU wants to decide on which type of computing environment it wants to develop

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