Nonprofit Organizational Assessment

If organizational culture is seen as something that characterizes an organization, it can
be manipulated and altered depending on leadership and members. Culture as root
metaphor sees the organization as its culture, created through communication and
symbols, or competing metaphors. Culture is basic, with personal experience producing
a variety of perspectives.
The organizational communication perspective on culture views culture in three different
ways:
Traditionalism: views culture through objective things such as stories, rituals, and
symbols
Interpretivism: views culture through a network of shared meanings (organization
members sharing subjective meanings)
Critical-interpretivism: views culture through a network of shared meanings as
well as the power struggles created by a similar network of competing meanings.
Business executive Bernard L. Rosauer (2013) defines organizational culture as
an emergence – an extremely complex incalculable state that results from the
combination of a few ingredients. In "Three Bell Curves: Business Culture
Decoded" Rosauer outlines the three manageable ingredients which (he claims) guide
business culture:
1. employee (focus on engagement)
2. the work (focus on eliminating waste increasing value) waste
3. the customer (focus on likelihood of referral)
Rosauer writes that the Three Bell Curves methodology aims to bring leadership, their
employees, the work and the customer together for focus without distraction, leading to
an improvement in culture and brand. He states: "If a methodology isn't memorable, it
won't get used. The Three Bell Curves Methodology is simple (to remember) but
execution requires strong leadership and diligence. Culture can be guided by managing
the ingredients."
Reliance of the research and findings of Sirota Survey Intelligence, which has been
gathering employee data worldwide since 1972, the Lean Enterprise
Institute, Cambridge, MA, and Fred Reichheld/Bain/Satmetrix research relating to
NetPromoterScore.
Typology of Cultural Types
Many factors can contribute to the type of culture which is observed in large
organizations and large institutions. The list ranges from depictions of relative strength
to political and national issues.
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