An organisation's culture is the collective behaviour of people in that organisation as defined by:

• the meaning they give to behaviours and activities;
• the values that act as guidelines for people's behaviour;
• the vision the organisation has of itself and into the future;
• the norms and beliefs adopted by its people;
• the language used in the work environment by its people;
• the systems and processes that are used and adapted to satisfy its nature and needs;
• the things they do that have been learned by their own invention, discovery and development;
• the symbols used in the work environment;
• the rituals and habits that people in the organisation display and which the organisation endorses.

These factors combine into a unique mental and attitudinal frame that is shared by employees and which is 'taught', normally informally, to new employees.

The culture gives the people within the organisation a sense of belonging, a group identity, a sense of family and a validation of why they think about things in a certain way.

It offers both an excuse for behaviours and attitudes while simultaneously providing the encouragement for those same behaviours and attitudes.

Culture can also confer on people power, status, authority, rewards and punishment, friendship and respect.

Parts of the culture may be documented into formal statements such as the Organisation's Vision, or the organisation's A Statement Organisation's Values. Other aspects remain informal and rarely documented.

People sculpt culture; people affect people; managers affect people.

Therefore managers and people, by the way they interpret the culture and support or oppose it, can influence the way the organisation's culture deals with matters - such as change.

Some large organisations with complex, distributed or varied activities, may have multiple sub-cultures operating simultaneously. This certainly complicates matters but its people are practised in navigating their way through the complexity.

As an example, a company may have a Head Office culture while its operations in the mine fields may have an entirely different culture. A division of an organisation in one country may (and probably will) have a slightly or significantly different culture to a division in the same organisation operating in another country. The sales function in an organisation may have a different culture to the manufacturing division of the same organisation.

Remember too, that an organisation's culture is itself a sub-culture reflecting many or most attributes of the social and cultural context in which it exists.

It’s easy to suggest that multiple cultures in the one organisation lead to conflict. It certainly may, but most large organisations have multiple cultural nuances that do co-exist. The reasons for this are simple:

• Each culture works in its own context;
• The degree of overlap is minimal. The workers in the mine stay in the mine and the workers at Head Office stay at head office. Most commonly, they interact at senior or functional management level.
• When people of two separate cultures interact, they adopt a third neutral culture within which they will transact their needs. Everyone understands this and knows not to try to impose one's culture on the other.

For these reasons, multi-cultural organisations are still able to work effectively.

That doesn't mean that it's easy or that cultural mismatches never occur; they do, but the presence of sub-cultures does not automatically flag problems or failure.

Culture is one of the hardest (if not the hardest) things to change within an organisation, particularly a large one, yet it’s possible to achieve with care, preplanning, understanding, empathy and wisdom.

Despite the difficulty, culture should never be regarded as a given. Culture exists as a result of the organisation's evolution and its needs. Sometimes the culture helps the organisation do what it’s there to do, and sometimes it hinders its efforts.

As hard as it may be, sometimes it’s necessary to realign an organisation's culture with the organisation's objectives and intent.

The reason this is difficult is because people become familiar and comfortable with the various filters that define the organisation's culture. Being able to play the game is very important in many organisations. No wonder then, that when you attempt to change what people feel secure with, they will resist.

We noted previously that the organisation is never a culture-free zone. Apart from its own evolution, the organisation is composed of individuals, each of whom comes to the organisation with their ideologies and value systems. Sometimes they meld effectively into whichever organisational culture or sub-culture they are immersed in, and sometimes the melding process carries tensions and stress. Organisations are therefore rich with cultural overlays.