2. Organizational Culture and Values
Communicating with Internal and External Stakeholders
A
strong organization is created, in part, by the adoption and maintenance of values shared
by internal and external agents. organizations with strong cultures place a great emphasis
on values and have three characteristics in common:
They
stand for something. They
have a clear and explicit philosophy about how they aim to conduct their project/programme purpose.
Management
pays a great deal of attention to shaping and fine-tuning these values
to conform to the economic and project/programme purpose environment of the organization and to communicate
them to the organization.
Values
are known and shared by all people who
work for the organization from the production workers to the senior management team.
Select five
communication documents produced by top-level managers at your organization. These documents might be internal memos,
newsletters, press releases or job descriptions. Carefully
read each document and identify the core values articulated in each memo. Examples of values might be creativity, ingenuity,
dedication, supplication, diversity and so on. Make
a list of these core values and continue to add to it as time passes. What do these values communicate about your organization’s culture? Do they focus on employees, products and services,
beneficiaries, and other stakeholders or do they inorganizational several or all of these? How do
top-level or mid-level managers respond to these values?
beneficiary service representatives? Workers
in the field? Union representatives?