Organizational Culture: Key Issues. A Literature Review

In the today's global, knowledge-based digital economy, the organizational culture becomes a strategic source of sustained competitive advantage. Therefore, the organizational culture is an increasingly important issue of academic research, education, organizational theory and management practice. And there are good reasons for this: the cultural dimension is critical in every aspect of the organizational life. Even in those organizations where cultural issues receive little overt attention, the way people in the organization think, feel, appreciate and work is guided by socially-shared ideas, meanings and beliefs of a cultural nature. In most of the nowadays’ organizations, organizational culture enjoys a particular attention and is considered a key factor. However, even in those cases where senior managers have shown a strong awareness of the importance of culture, there is often a lack of a deeper insight and understanding of how people and organizations work in terms of culture. Culture is as important as it is complex, so it is difficult to understand and “use” it in a rigorous way. The famous business management guru Peter Drucker said that “culture eats strategy for breakfast”. This picturesque phrase comes to advocate the importance of a thorough understanding of the concept that we wish to describe in this study. To this end, we intend to present a summary review of the specialized literature we have studied in order to rigorously understand what the concept of organizational culture actually implies. In this regard, in the first part of this article we present an overview of the concept of culture and the way it has been approached. In the second part of this article, we describe the basic aspects of the concept of organizational culture, such as the organizational culture ”vehicles” and flows and the levels, the types and the “weaknesses” of the organizational culture. In our survey we have applied the qualitative research methodology, consisting of collecting documentation and texts. As for the data analysis, we resorted to the content analysis method.