By: Alexandrea Matthews

• As is stated in Organizational Communication: Balancing Creativity and Constraint, “Organizational culture stands for the actions, ways of thinking, practices, stories, and artifacts that characterize a particular organization.”

• The cultural approach in organizational communication focuses on looking at people in a workplace’s interaction together, their shared values, and their ritual or routine practices.

• All of these variables are meant to show that workplaces act as their own little cultures.

• “An organizational culture is a pattern of shared basic assumptions that have been invented, discovered, and/or developed by a group as it learns to cope with problems of external adaptation and internal integration.” – Edgar Schein

• This is a YouTube video which shows a program called Fish Philosophy. It can be purchased by companies for day by day approaches at building a more unified workplace. It aims at changing the culture for the better. Fish Culture

• This video is discussing how to bring people in a workplace together by holding fun events like karaoke. Events like this are part of a workplace’s culture. Kareoke Culture

• These are a couple videos from the t.v. show, The Office and the movie, Waiting that show culture in the workplace.

The Office

Waiting

• The NWSF had its own little culture, however dysfunctional it may have been.

• There were the main committees like the organizing committee and planning committee. The leaders of the committees seemed to have self-elected themselves and did not give the members much say in anything, hence bringing in tension.

• Then there were the participants, who came from a broad range of races and believed they were going to be part of all the planning but were left out of it.

The NWSF’s culture was broken up by a lack of communication between all the committees and participant groups, which was never able to come together and compromise.

• There was such a great lack of communication that each committee and each participating group eventually broke off, back into their own cultures because there was nothing going forward with the NWSF’s culture.

To have a successful workplace culture there must be good communication and good leadership to hold everyone together.