rituals;
3. Espoused values, which may be different from enacted values;
4. Formal philosophy, including mission statements;
5. Rules of the game, which represent the way the organization does things;
6. Climate, or both the environment and way in which individual members of the organization interact;
7. Embedded skills, including skills that are passed down through the organizational generations;
8. Habits of thinking, including mental models and paradigms;
10. Root metaphors or shared symbols (Schein, 1985, pp. 8 10).
While these are some of the most common characteristics of cultures in general that have been currently established, Schein also noted that there has been considerable debate during the recent past about the concept of culture and its utility. There is considerable ambiguity involved in the term and that fuzziness means that it can be used to describe almost anything, or explain many different kinds of things, without necessarily being precise enough to be workable. For purposes of this study, however, Schein's formal definition of organizational culture will be used. That definition is:
A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. (Schein, 1985, p. 12)
Schein noted that this definition brought up three specific elements that must be considered in thinking about organizational culture, including the problem of socialization, the problem of behavior, and the question of whether or not a large organization can have only one culture. In some respects, the listing of qualities of a culture seems more useful than the formal definition, because it is the disparate aspects of each culture that lead to specific behaviors and that are...