Introduction
Recently, many organizations have been coming up. They have been offering different job opportunities to people. These organizations have different types of culture, communication and management styles. The workers have to adapt to these styles in order to fit better in the organization. This paper discusses different types of culture, communication and management styles found in an organization and the impacts of culture on organizational communication.
Organization
An organization is a socially arranged body that has collective goals and objectives to pursue. It takes control of its own performance and is separated from its environment by a boundary. There are various types of organizations which include government, Universities, non-governmental among others. As mentioned above, they have different cultures, communication and management styles (William 10).
Organizational management styles
Many scholars have defined management in many ways. According to William (12), management refers to the process of controlling, organizing, planning, leading and motivating organizational resources to achieve specific goals and objectives set by the organization. For this process to take place, management styles have to be employed. Management styles refer to the ways in which departments, regions, divisions and staff relate and work with one another in an organization. These management styles are mainly categorized into two. They include flat and hierarchal styles. In a flat management style, decision-making process is decentralized to the baseline workers and staff involvement is increased. In hierarchal management style, each individual is not allowed to jump over an immediate supervisor to get to the top leaders. William (17), further recommends that other organizational theorists classify management styles into democratic, autocratic, participatory, charismatic and bureaucracy classical management principle-based management styles.
Organizational Communication styles
Most scholars define communication but Bacon (18), defines it as a way of passing information from one person to another. In an organizational context, several styles or patterns are used to pass information from sender to receiver. They include chain where information flow is from the top down in an organization. Another style is wheel where one man rules and participation of employees is limited. In addition, another style is all-channel network. In this style, there is free flow of communication among the members and are encouraged to participate in decision-making process.
Organizational Culture
One important part of an organization is organizational culture. Culture is defined as beliefs, customs and arts that make up a way of life for a group of people at a certain time. Organizational culture has been found to lie in the field of management and organization. Moreover, it controls the way members of an organization relate with one another and with the organization’s outside stakeholders (Bacon 21). In addition to that, this definition further explains organizational values as ideas and beliefs governing organization goals to be achieved. It also governs standard behaviors of the members of the organization in a particular situation and towards achieving these goals.
Organizational culture is important because it can lead to success or failure of an organization. An organization will always perform well without breaking if it has an adaptive culture towards business goals. To achieve this, one has to figure out what his or her organizational culture is, make a decision and move everyone towards it. Organizational culture changes with time. The change may be positive or negative. It can be a minor or a major change. One cause of these changes is as a result of employees leaving and being replaced. These employees have their own culture that influences the organization. If the organization’s culture is strong, it will change a little. Moreover, as the organization grows bigger, its culture changes. Lastly, as the environment of an organization changes, so does the organization’s culture (Bacon 23).
It was resolved that successful organizational culture has various characteristics and can be assessed to rate the status of an organization’s culture. Most scholars have discussed and come up with several characteristics. William (24), discussed the same issue and came up with characteristics such as high degree of adaptability, accountability and commitment of the employees, high degree of support and effectiveness by the leadership to initiate innovations, mission and vision that have been clearly defined to facilitate achieving organization goals among others. Using such characteristics as the reference frame, organization culture can be assessed and improved to meet such characteristics. One way of doing this is by hiring a consultant. This consultant assesses the culture and reports its status. The easiest and cheapest way is assessment by oneself. It can be achieved by listening to the outside stakeholders and members of the organization. In addition to that, one should observe the common behavior of the members of the organization. Finally, one should look at what is printed or written online about the organization. The next step is to design how the organization’s culture should look like by reviewing the mission, values and vision (Bacon 26).
Types of organizational culture
William (25), discussed and concluded that there are several types of organizational cultures. The first one is personal culture. This culture employs superiority of individuals to the organization. Some organizations can operate as personal cultures if their members are expertise in particular fields. Such organizations can have difficulties in surviving because the members pursuing organization goals are like-minded. For instance, people with expertise in the fields of electrical, mechanical and production engineering come together to form a consultant firm. Task culture is another type of organizational culture. In this culture, particular problems are performed by teams who are highly skilled and have expertise in different fields. For instance, in cases of failure of the pump house generator, the problem is operated by a team of mechanics. William (26), concluded that other organizational culture include power and role cultures. Organizations that use role culture employ hierarchical bureaucracies.
Impacts of culture on organizational communication
Since culture is values and beliefs shared by a group of people and communication is passage of information from one person to the other, culture impacts organizational communication in one way or another. Since an organization is made up of different people with different values and experiences, they, directly and indirectly, share meanings, knowledge, experiences among others. This is done through organizational communication. In the end, the people end up learning from each other through communication. Others, who have experience of past events and encounter similar events in the future, can solve the problem by guiding information processes through communication (Bacon 29).
Conclusion
To conclude, different organizations employ different management, communication and culture styles. The most important thing for an organization is to employ the most appropriate styles for its prosperity.
Works cited
Bacon, Allyn. Organizational Communication for Survival to Work. 3rd Edition, McGraw-Hill Professional, 2009. Pg.18 -29.
William, Brian. Organizational Communication, Management and Cultural Styles. London: Pearson Publishers, 2008. Pg.10-26.