Edgar Schein's 3 Levels of Organizational Culture

edgarshine of the sloan school of management was interested in organizational culture and he produced what is perhaps the best known and most widely used model he divided organizational culture into three levels artifacts values and assumptions and that's what we'll look at in this video shine's three levels artifacts values and assumptions are rather like an iceberg in that the most important bits are the parts you can't see however the bit you can see the bit above the water line with the artifacts artifacts are the visible surface elements of an organizational culture they're what an outside observer

would easily see in this way they are pretty similar to the symbols of the johnson scholes model which we looked at in another video typical examples include branding furniture colors dress code day-to-day rituals job titles and to incorporate something else that shows distinguished stories the stories that people tell about their organization are artifacts of the organization and readily visible to outsiders whilst artifacts are easy to observe they can sometimes be difficult to understand because there's a lot of deeper stuff going on and we need to excavate below that level to properly understand an organizational culture

stories give us a good example of this because whilst there are stories that are told outside of the organization there are quite possibly other stories that are only told inside the organization and they drive these deeper levels but critically it's the interpretation of these stories what they mean which give rise to the values and the assumptions of the organization the second level therefore is the espoused values of the organization these are the declared sets of values that the organization has and the norms of behavior it expects of its members as a result they set out

what should be done how we should do it and the choices we should make values dictate the way that the members of the organization interact with one another behave and represent their organization to the outside world the organization often amplifies these espoused values by public statements visible symbols if you like such as statements of values or organizational strap lines that go with their branding and their identity but underpinning everything are the shared basic assumptions about the organization the deep interpretations of the stories we tell about ourselves these are the beliefs that people take for granted

about the organization they often go unnoticed and are rarely even questioned they're very similar to johnson and schultz paradigm but if you want to understand the artifacts of an organization and indeed the values it sets out they need to get to grips with the shared assumptions in 1985 edgarshine described six basic types of assumption that together would form what johnson and schulz would describe as the organizational paradigm these are assumptions about the truth and how we determine it the importance of time and the extent to which we respect it and how we choose to use

it how space within the organization is owned and allocated and the respect that people give to it there are assumptions about human nature whether people are inherently good or bad whether people can change where the behavior is fixed this isn't an academic discussion about what is right it's a set of assumptions that are held within the organization which drive its choices and its culture the fifth type of assumption is very important in the modern world it's the relationship between the organization and its environment and indeed between the organization's members and their environment and you can

see how this can drive some very important decisions which are going to drive public perceptions and therefore are going to be intrinsic to the future success of many organizations and finally there are a whole set of assumptions around social power and how people should relate to one another and yes that social power term links closely to the french and raven social power bases that we looked at in another video assumptions about social power dictate a lot of behaviors like how power and responsibilities are allocated within the organization and the extent to which that power is

respected the balance between cooperation and competition within the organization the extent to which individuals are minded to collaborate with one another or to operate on their own and therefore the styles of leadership which people expect and the ways that we resolve conflict and make decisions edgarshine's three levels offer us a simpler way to understand how organizations work than johnson and scholes seven components however that simplicity makes it really easy for us to understand how the model works and to use it day to day because recognizing a culture means recognizing that below the visible easy to

grasp artifacts are deeper shared values and very deep assumptions which are driving the culture and what this tells us is that if you really want to shift a culture you have to shift the assumptions that underpin everything it might be that changing some of the artifacts is a way to do this but fundamentally if you can't shift assumptions you cannot change culture please do give a thumbs up if you like this video there's loads more great management courses content to come so please do subscribe to the channel and hit that notification bell so you don't

miss any of it i look forward to seeing you in the next video and in the meantime keep learning