Organizational Culture Observation Report

The next time I walk-in into any store I would surely observe more than I ever have until now. The reason simply being that in the last couple of days I have learnt so much about organisational culture and its different aspects that I can no longer look at any organisation the way I used to look at it before. Earlier, whenever I used to visit a store, it never occurred to me that everything that I could possibly see in that store was meant to be the way it is for a reason. I was unaware of the fact that every store or every organisation for that matter has its own culture and has its own way of doing things.
When I was asked to visit a Warehouse store and observe everything that I possibly could, I was very confused and couldn 't figure out the meaning of that exercise. So with a very unclear idea of …show more content…
It looked just like any other store. Then the other day in class when I was learning about organisational culture and values, it suddenly struck me that these were the things that I was looking at the previous day at the Warehouse. By looking at the way they worked at the Warehouse I was unknowingly experiencing their culture. Then as I learnt more about the Schein 's model of the 3 levels of an organisational culture, I started to connect the dots. All that I could see at the Warehouse the other day were nothing else but 'Artefacts ' as they are described by Schein in his model. Artefacts are the 1st level in Schein 's model. Artefacts are things that are you can see or feel, they are tangible things, for example an artefact could be the logo or slogan of an organisation. So where do these artefacts come from? These artefacts don 't just happen overnight, these are a result of many years of shared values held by individuals who work in that organisation. Values form the 2nd level in Schein 's model. These values are underlying but they can be seen through the behavior of the employees of that organisation. The way in which individuals