According to the Business Dictionary (2015), Organizational culture encompasses values and behaviors that “contribute to the unique social and psychological environment of an organization.” Organizational culture represents the shared behaviors, values, beliefs and principles of organizational members and is a product of such factors as history, product, market, technology, vision, professional discipline, and national culture. Thus, organizational culture affects the way people and groups interact with each other, with clients, and with stakeholders.

In addition, organizational culture may affect how much employees identify with an organization. Many authors advanced the idea that organizations often have very differing cultures as well as subcultures.

Although a company may have its “own unique culture”, in larger organizations there are sometimes co-existing or conflicting subcultures because each subculture is linked to a different management team. Several methods have been used to classify organizational culture. While there is no single “type” of organizational culture and organizational cultures vary widely from one organization to the next, commonalities do exist and some researchers have developed models to describe different indicators of organizational cultures. This most cited models are discussed later in this chapter.