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The Role of Organizational Culture 227

that the attitudes, beliefs, and visions they have always taken for granted are actually
standardized assumptions that they may pass to future generations. The diffi culty of
making sense of culture lies in the fact that even though the artifacts of culture can
be easily sensed, the core of the culture, values, which are defi ned as “ broad, nonspe-
cifi c feelings of good and evil, beautiful and ugly, normal and abnormal, rational and
irrational are often unconscious and rarely discussable ” ( Hofstede et al. 1990 , 291).
Cultural artifacts are both conceptual (such as language) and material. They mediate
interaction with the world, coordinating people ’ s activities with the physical world
and with each other.
There is a reciprocal relationship between organizational culture and communi-
cation ( Pepper 1995 ). On the one hand, communication is the tool that helps to
transmit organizational culture to each other and to the newcomers of the organiza-
tion, and it also enables the culture to be maintained and developed in its particular
way. In a sense, culture comes into being through constant communication among
the members of the organization, and communication changes the cultural assump-
tions over time. On the other hand, culture deeply shapes and alters the communi-
cation within this specifi c culture. “ The culture encourages certain topics for
communication and discounts others. The culture often determines who talks with
whom, on what occasions, and covering what matters ” ( Neher 1997 ). Organizational
culture, therefore, may be thought of as the manner in which an organization solves
problems to achieve its specifi c goals and to maintain itself over time. Moreover, it
is holistic, historically determined, socially constructed, and diffi cult to change
( Hofstede et al. 1990 ).

Different Types of Cultures

Of course, people do not always behave as expected, and the above cultural profi les
are very generic. There is a good analogy between organizational culture and the
climate control of a large building: although the temperature may be set at room
temperature throughout the company, there are in fact a series of different microcli-
mates depending on which part of the building you are in, how the offi ce furniture
is arranged, the number of people, the number of plants, and so forth. A similar situ-
ation exists with organizational culture: although an organization as a whole may be
characterized as having a particular type of culture, there will be in fact many different
types of microcultures in evidence throughout the company. Some of these may be
picked up in examining the CoPs that exist, the different types of professionals or skill
sets that make up the company ’ s human capital, and so forth.