Thesis (Ph. D.)--Washington State University, May 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 3, 2009). "Department of American Studies." Includes bibliographical references (p. 177-188).

Thesis (M.S. in environmental science)--Washington State University, May 2009. / Title from PDF title page (viewed on June 9, 2009). "School of Earth and Environmental Sciences." Includes bibliographical references (p. 60-61).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 92-97). Also available on the Internet.

Published Article / The political and social transformation process in South Africa is forcing organisations to avoid the sensitive, unpleasant and potentially volatile behaviour at workplace that can arise when groups or individuals who differ work together or come into close contact with each other. Therefore, management developed a corporate culture which creates an environment that is conducive to performance improvement, shapes the way people act and interact, as a result, this culture influences how things get done. The corporate culture encompasses the organisation's goals, business ethics and dominant ideologies. Based on the results of this study, these cultural changes ought to be driven by the fact that employees respond to the way in which the organisation treats them. The research aims to investigate the impact of organisational culture on the gold mining activities. The impact of organisational culture is demonstrated through a sense of identity and unity of purpose by the members of the organisation, commitment of employees to their work and existence of strategies and programmes which provide guidance on what is expected. The premise is that organisational culture determines socialisation, power relationship, policies and procedures, reward systems, communication systems and ideology, all of which have a significant impact on the day to day experiences of all employees.

This research exposed some of the factors that affected organisational culture and group behaviour in Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) from its inception in 2007 through to 2014, when it became a Bespoke Trading Entity. The factors that were examined included organisationally legitimised personal, social and geographic identity, and linguistic difference and group size. Metaphor was also used by group members to describe the relationship they had with their groups. Group size was another factor that affected group behaviour. Finally, the effects of socio-technical induction and socio-cultural integration were seen to be additional factors that allowed cultural drag to occur within DE&S. The research was an insider ethnographic study that used a qualitative, multi-factorial approach which encompassed 6 years of observations, 124 interviews, and included the analysis of appropriate DE&S policy documents. This thesis is considered to be unique because no research of this nature, or at this level, has been carried out in DE&S, the Defence Procurement Agency (DPA) and the Defence Logistics Organisation (DLO). In addition, no studies have investigated the organisational culture of DE&S, apart from Kirke (2007a unpublished), Kirke (2010), which was a published article that was informed by that pilot study. The factors that were identified combined to produce both an organisation that possessed multiple organisational cultures and one single ethos which was that of delivering equipment to troops and supporting the troops, described as ‘front-line-first’. There was also an organisational culture that was affected by both the socio-technical and socio-cultural interactions of its members and of unconscious behaviours. All of those factors acted together as a system of interactions, with different factors taking primacy depending on the organisational context, no single factor being consistently more important than any other. The ethos of “front-line-first” was embedded within the DE&S organisational culture as a value which may have been used as a metaphor for the primacy of the overarching organisational culture of supporting the front-line.

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics

No description available.

No description available.

A theory about how an organization's culture influences decisions made within that organization is described and a new, easily administered instrument for rapidly assessing an organization's culture is introduced. Then a series of studies is presented, some of which assess the reliability and validity of the instrument and others of which test some of the implications of the theory. The instrument is shown to be a reliable and valid measure of organizational culture, and the research results support the predictions of the theory on both a group and an individual level. Finally, the instrument is used as part of an organization development intervention. It is concluded that the theory and the instrument provide a promising foundation for further research on the role of organizational culture in organizational decision making and for use as a tool for organization development.

No description available.