Daryl Jane Agbayani Caballero
College of Business and Management
Central Mindanao University
Organizations spend resources in many forms. These include financial, human, and time to effectively steer themselves toward a positive strategic direction. Organizations create committees, conduct strategic planning workshops, hold a series of meetings, and consult stakeholders. These are often lengthy and resource-intensive processes, but they are undertaken to ensure that an organization’s vision, mission, and objectives referred to as strategic statements remain anchored on national goals, institutional policies, and present realities. Strategic statements guide organizations in prioritizing activities, allocating resources, generating solutions, and making decisions. But after the workshops have ended and strategic statements have been approved, what happens next? A strategic direction becomes meaningful only when it finds its way into the everyday life of the organization. It must be reflected in how leaders decide, how employees respond, and how people treat one another. Otherwise, they remain merely as words in plans and office walls. This is where strategic direction inevitably meets organizational culture.
Organizational culture is often easier to feel than to explain. We notice it in the way people speak, how employees behave, and even in what people choose not to say. At its core, culture reflects the shared beliefs, values, and norms within an organization. Scholarly works have long emphasized its crucial role in the goal attainment of organizations. Interestingly, many strategic elements to which organizations devote considerable attention: vision, mission, and core values, belong largely to only one layer of organizational culture. They do not represent culture in its entirety. This raises an important question: Do we examine the deeper layers that may either support or quietly work against our strategic direction? Edgar Schein helps us understand this through three layers of organizational culture.
ARTIFACTS. These are the most visible layer of organizational culture. These are the things we readily see, hear, and observe: the physical workspace, dress codes, logos, institutional hues, landmarks, office arrangements, and even the way meetings are conducted. They matter because they create impressions and provide clues about how work is done. An open office may suggest collaboration, while highly formal communication and strict protocols may reflect the importance placed on hierarchy. Yet artifacts can be easy to observe but difficult to interpret. A modern office does not automatically mean an organization is innovative.
ESPOUSED BELIEFS AND VALUES. These are the principles and priorities an organization openly says are important. We find them in vision and mission statements, core values, policies, strategic plans, and official pronouncements. Beyond these, however, are other positive values that organizations consider important. Integrity, innovation, and resilience are examples of values that equally require deliberate strategies to be practiced and sustained. But an important question must be asked: Are these values actually practiced? Who ensures they are translated into everyday behavior? Are there mechanisms to reinforce them or correct actions that consistently contradict them? An organization may proudly declare innovation as a core value, but if every new idea is immediately dismissed, employees will eventually learn that playing safe is valued more than trying something new.
BASIC UNDERLYING ASSUMPTIONS. These form the deepest and perhaps the most powerful layer of organizational culture, yet often receive the least deliberate attention. These are beliefs and ways of thinking that have become so accepted over time that people rarely question them. They quietly tell members what is normal, safe, right, and expected. No policy may say that a senior leader should never be questioned, yet employees remain silent because they have learned that disagreement is unwelcome. There may be no instruction to hide mistakes, yet people do so because experience has taught them that admitting errors often ends only in blame. Over time, people learn what causes trouble, and what is safer left unsaid. Eventually, these lessons become the unwritten understanding of “how things are really done.” Positive assumptions must be strengthened, while those that encourage fear, or resistance must be corrected.
Understanding these three layers reminds us that organizational culture goes far beyond what is written on walls or declared in official statements. What organizations strategically declare must eventually be reflected in what their people repeatedly experience and practice. If organizations are serious about realizing their strategic direction, we must look beyond what is visible and pay attention to what lies beneath.
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