Organisational Behaviour Assignment Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 4000 words

Organisational Behaviour - Assignment Example Hofstede explains that culture is a group of individuals with a collective mind programming. Schein (1992) explains the need for individuals to adapt to change without the need to impact the culture. It is crucial to understand the term culture before entering into the organisational culture. Cultures are deep-seated and pervasive. Schein (1992) explains that change is not possible without affecting the culture. Similarly, organisation culture is a concept used to explain the ‘similar collective mind programming’ of the individuals in the organisation. In most cases, when individuals work together in a wok environment, with the set down regulations and framework on the job, the approach to work becomes a common aspect for all employees, hence making them a group of people with similar mind programming. Based on Hofstede’s definition, this clearly makes an organisational culture. For around two and a half decades, the concept of organisational culture has been grow ing and being accepted to a great extent. Considering an open systems perspective, it is clear that the culture of an organisation is important element and environmental condition which affects the systems and the subsystems. The organisational culture is also a very valuable tool for analysis of a company and is very effective in getting a clear understanding of the company. To be able to understand the concept of culture better, it is essential to understand the definition. The next sub section details the definition of culture for organisations. Culture has been described in many different manners and various different ideas have been put forth to explain the concept. Anderson explains nations to be an ‘imagined community’ and Wallerstein explains that he is â€Å"skeptical that we can operationalise the concept of culture ... in any way that enables us to use it for statements that are more than trivial† (Wallerstein, 1990, p. 34). Another renowned author Hof stede has explained that there are four (later turned to five) main dimensions of culture (Hofstede, 1880, 1984, 1991). In 1998, he claimed that the true shift in paradigm was proved by the acceptance of the concept of unique, specific and powerful national cultures. Considering his theory, this model can be evaluated in a number of manners. The theory portrays to a great extent the national cultures that have emerged in the recent years and his theory has been more focused on the rich origin of the culture. This has been argued to be misleading as it is to a great extent considered to be immeasurable. The findings have been argued to be based mainly on the predictive value and the reviewing of smaller scale replications is also essential. Hofstede has provided a very different approach to the concept of culture. He classified culture based on dimensions. These are a) Power / Distance, b) Individualism, c) Masculinity, d) Uncertainty/Avoidance Index, and e) Long Term Orientation. Th ere have been a number of arguments regarding the accuracy of the theory. As explained by Brendan McSweeney, â€Å"Hofstede's apparently sophisticated analysis of extensive data necessarily relies on a number of profoundly flawed assumptions to measure the 'software of the mind' as did Morton's measurement of the hardware, as it were, of the mind† (Mc Sweeney, 2002, p. 116). Mc Sweeney moves on to also explain, â€Å"Hofstede's claims are excessive and unbalanced; excessive because they claim far more in terms of identifiable characteristics and consequences

Internet Research Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1250 words

Internet Research - Essay Example It is even easier and more economical to a certain extent to surf the internet than to go to a public library to search for books. The internet allows you to search and use information at the safety and comfort of your own home or office. The internet also offers a wide array of means to search for data. There are a variety of search engines available for use to cater to whatever your need is. For the purpose of determining if internet research is really very helpful and sufficient in acquiring data for a specific study or topic, I have employed internet research as the primary and the only data gathering methodology for answering the question: Is the population of the UK healthier than it was 5 or 10 years ago. The initial part of my research plan is to come up with topics or questions related to the health of the UK population. These topics would help me find answers to the main question. I then chose three search engines: www.Google.com for the web-crawler type, www.Dogpile.com for the meta-search type and www.UKwizz.com for the one category based type. I had a difficulty with the one category based search engine because I was not able to immediately figure out the better choice between a health specific search engine and a country or geography specific search engine. ... I know that the search results are heavily dependent on the search topics or criteria. The way in which the subject is entered in the search box has a lot of weight because the search engines are also greatly dependent on key words in order to search for accurate matches. I had scrapped topics like the increase or decrease of insurance health claims in the UK, and the increase or decrease of pharmaceutical medicine sales in the UK. The insurance health claims subject returned useless sites where most of the sites involved insurance companies and their policies. On the other hand, the medicine sales search subject resulted to consumer sites offering medicines and websites of pharmaceutical companies. I came up with four reasonable topics which I used to search for information I needed to check whether the UK population now is healthier than five or ten years before. The topics were: UK Population Health Trends, UK Health Campaigns, UK Mortality rate and New Human Diseases in UK. I initially planned on using questions as search subjects but decided not to after a certain number of tries. I discovered that the more words you include in the statement you put in the search box, the less accurate the results generated are. This is because the engine looks at every word in the statement entered and generates hits involving the most number of words, which it saw in the statement. These words may not be in order. It is the most number of word combinations that the engine looks for. Since the words are not in order, then the essence or meaning of the statement relating to the generated result is oftentimes not related to the topic being searched for. I chose Google as my web crawler search engine mainly