Small organizations may have a single culture, while very large organizations may have a dominant corporate culture and numerous subcultures. The culture represents the organization s worldview and what it considers to be reality. Culture is made up of various artifacts, values and assumptions. It reflects the organization s basic beliefs about what the organization is about, how its members are expected to behave, and defines itself in relation to the environment. The environment is anything outside the control of the organization that impacts the organization.
Organizational culture is unique to each organization.
However, organizational cultures seem to fall along a continuum. At one end of the continuum is the power pyramid model and at the other end is the inverted pyramid servant-leadership model. Various names have been applied to these two models. A culture on the power pyramid side of the continuum might be referred to as a traditional, bureaucratic, patriarchic, or autocratic organizational culture. In reality, the description of organizational culture is far more complex, since such cultures are multi-dimensional.