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Organization Culture

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Organization Culture
Management Essay
Organization Culture

Introduction: In this essay, I will firstly discuss the issue of culture metaphor developed by Morgan in 1986; secondly, the effect of organization culture on the design of organization structure and national culture on organization culture will be analyzed. Lastly, I will comment on the ways of power exist in an organization.

Culture metaphor There are many theories and perspectives people can take to study and design an organization. Since it is a complex system that there is no one particular theory can fully interpret the whole operation and every aspects of it. “Metaphor”, which is a crucial idea in the field of organization management developed by Morgan, G in 1986, has been used to facilitate understanding of the nature of organizations and evaluating organizational phenomena. In Morgan’s thesis, very aspects of organization and organization management are reflections of some implicit metaphor, in turn; these implicit metaphors aid us in understanding and highlighting the essential parts of organization. However, they may restrict our mind in certain aspects by ignoring others parts thus results in lacking of managerial innovation and creation. There are total eight metaphors to defined organization as: machines, organisms, brains, cultures, political systems, psychic prisons, flux and transformation, and instruments of domination.

Concerning Morgan’s viewpoint that “"One of the major strengths of the culture metaphor rests in the fact that it directs attention to the symbolic significance of even the most rational parts of organizational life", we simply take the metaphor of machines as an example to evaluate this idea. Machines stand for a mechanism that form of “bureaucratic structure”, which providing the basis for efficient operation and offering continuity and security (as cited in Mullins, 1999). When thinking about an organization, the most explicit feature is a process of input and output,

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