Culture, organisational

Several types of organisational cultures have been identified. 

Denison, D.R. (1996) What is the difference between organisational culture and organisational climate A native s point of view on a decade of paradigm wars. Academy of Management Review, 21(3), 619-54. 

Organisational Culture and Leadership (Schein, 1985). The link with leadership will be discussed further below, but what interests us now is the clarity of Schein s conceptualization of culture. Weick and Sutcliffe (2001) summarize this as ... 

Schein, B. (1985) Organisation Culture and Leadership, Jossey Bass, San Francisco CA. 

Balthazard, RA. Cooke, R.A. 2004. Organisation Culture and Knowledge Management Success Assessing The Be haviour-Performance Continuum. In Proceeding of the Hawaii International Conference on System science 1-10. 

The last proposed dimension of RSDI is the road safety organisational index that measures how much is the cooperation between the key bodies responsible for road safety actions in the country, how much funding is spent on road safety measures. It shows the level of development of national road safety council and NGOs. It shows how far each country is from the goal of national road safely programs (if there is any). This index can be developed further and benefit from other available indices especially those used to assess the management development and organisational culture between countries. This index is not used here because of lack of data. 

An outcome of a generalist approach is that cultures can be described with a limited number of aspects, e.g. dimensions, facets or factors. A unique culture approach does not have this common underlying framework and its descriptions are limited to single cultures. However, either approach can ultimately lead to a third approach, that is a typology of cultures. All three approaches are well represented in the organisational culture literature and can be discerned also in literature on safety culture. Again, this topic will be discussed more extensively below. 

Figure 2.1 The development of organisational culture based on a model by Berger and Lnckmann (1966)...

A somewhat similar classification can be foitnd with Smircich (1983), who states that an organisational culture can be viewed either as an independent or external variable as an internal variable within an organisation or as a root metaphor representing a collective view on life and experience. 

Nowadays, the notion of a unitary organisational crrlture has lost popularity in favour of a view promoting differentiation (Martin 2002 Richter and Koch 2004). In this view, (an organisational) culture is not considered unitary but consists of multiple srrbcrrltirres. A qirite radical view is based on social constructivism and proposes that culture is predominantly dynamic and much more defined situationally, i.e. a fragmentation view (Martin 2002). The heart of the matter lies perhaps between these latter two views, in that culture in the form of basic assumptions will be the ultimate result of continual interaction between group members, partly shown situationally and partly shown universally. 

Patient safety culture is a reasonably new development of the organisational safety culture constmct. As with other types of culture, the addition patient safety serves as a qualifler for the general concept of organisational culture. By using this qualifier the proposition is made that an organisational culture can be conducive, or uirfavourable, to patient safety. 

Cameron, K.S. and Quiim, R.E. 1999. Diagnosing and Changing Organisational Culture Based on the Competing Values Framework. Reading, MA Addison-Wesley. 

Frissen, P. 1986. Organisational culture An overview of approaches (in Dutch). M O, Tijdschriftvoor Organisatiekunde en Sociaal Beleid, 6,532—44. 

---