Organizational culture, also commonly referred to as corporate culture, is an implicit phenomenon rather than a formal, written one (Sherer, 1994, p. 21). It is the unwritten yet taken-for-granted system of organizational values that provides the members of the organization with a sense of identity and generates members' commitment to beliefs and values that are larger than themselves (Organizational Culture, p. 371). It enhances the organization's stability and helps members understand the organization's events and activities. Consequently, it operates as a system of objective values defined by the organizations' leadership but applied in practice through employee acceptance and support.
Sherer notes that the one certainty about corporate culture seems to be that every organization has one, and that each is ultimately shaped by effective leadership or the organization itself (1994, p. 22). However, despite the pervasiveness of corporate culture, Bastien, McPhee and Bolton note in their study of organizational climate that corporate culture has proven to be "an attractive nuisance" for organizational theorists and researchers (1995, p. 87). They observe that, on the one hand, organizational culture seems to be an important part of organizational reality for employees and managers but, on the other hand, it has proven to be elusive and extremely difficult to pin down (Bastien, McPhee & Bolton, 1995, p. 87).
Reimann and Wiener, in their analysis of corporate culture, note one of its most important aspects. They observe that the core values that go into defining the particular culture of an organization are only effectively disseminated when they are internalized by the organization's members (Organizational Culture, p. 370). The strength of any particular corporate culture is determined by the level of the internalization of the culture by its members. This is because the level of internalization in turn determines the l...