Organizational Culture in the Army

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The army is a large organization. It involves multiple units that have different tasks. For instance, there is a unit that is involved in the recruitment of soldiers. A second unit deals with the management of the training process. A third unit consists of deployed soldiers in different wars.

The fourth unit deals with organizing and managing the troops carrying out operations in the field. The executive unit deals with managing this fourth unit. The fifth unit is involved with dealing with criminal activities associated with servicemen and women. The army is characterized by well-defined structures and the roles of the different structures. It is also characterized by immense training before hiring. Servicemen and women are taught how to react to a wide range of situations to ensure survival during operations.

Organizational culture refers to the norm when employees are faced with opportunities or problems in an organization. It highlights issues like the perception of success and failure, established routines and procedures, symbols and language and the accepted form of leadership in an institution. Institutions that enjoy strong cultures have an ensured control system and social glue in place. This results in high organizational performance as well as, employee well-being. The Organizational Culture Profile (OCP) was developed in 1991. It is founded on the organizational culture model that was put forward by Caldwell, Chatman and OReilly.

This profile can be employed by a wide range of institutions to assess the culture of an organization. OCP can be described as a self-report measure which upon being analyzed gives an accurate reflection of an organizations culture. This is achieved by collecting personnel and employees perception of the preponderate values in an institution. It presents seven dominant values that can be used to assess organizational culture. These values include how much an organization is; innovative, stable, outcome-oriented, people-oriented, team-oriented, aggressive and detail-oriented. These values are further broken down into indicators associated with each value.

Table 1 shows organizational culture profile characteristics.

1 High expectation for performance 16 Attention to detail 30 Freedom of action
2 Take advantage of the opportunity 17 Rule oriented 31 Being careful
3 Compliance 18 Experimentation 32 Risk-taking
4 Being innovative 19 Predictability 33 Stability
5 Trust 20 Flexibility 34 Adaptability
6 Low level of conflict encouraged 21 Respect for individual rights 35 Being easy going
7 Tolerant of failure 22 Taking initiative 36 Being thoughtful
8 Informality 23 Fairness 37 Being result-oriented
9 Being aggressive 24 Being competitive 38 Decisiveness
10 Team oriented work 25 Being exact 39 Problem solving
11 Enthusiasm for the job 26 Working closely with others 40 Being calm
12 Develop friends at work 27 Confront conflict directly 41 Fitting in at work
13 Being different from others 28 Security of employment 42 Praised good performance
14 Socially responsible 29 Sharing information freely 44 Having a good reputation
15 Supportive of employees 43 Demanding of employees
41
12 24 4
27 42 18 40 11
26 25 38 31 6 35 13
1 10 39 33 20 19 7
16 3 9 2 21 18 8
17 15 23 37 36 28 14
44 43 34 5 22 35 29
Most Neither Characteristic Least
Characteristic Nor Uncharacteristic Characteristic

The policies involved hiring/laying off, performance evaluation criteria, dress code and promotion criteria are well defined. These policies have been employed by the army for decades. As such, they are constant and never change with changing times. This supports the organizational culture profile results where the army is mostly featured with compliance. Such compliance is expected to rules that have been laid out and have been applied for many past years.

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