Organizational Culture Management Challenges

Abstract Healthy organizational culture is an important condition for the long-term stable successful functioning of the organization. It is important for the organization to share the understanding and interpretation of culture, forming healthy attitudes, complex of values, developing strategies for combining personality and organizational cultures, ensuring compatibility with universal humanitarian values of organizational culture. Our research carried out by the Human Potential Management Laboratory is linked to the identification of the main characteristics of organizational culture at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University (TSU), revealing of challenges and elaboration of appropriate recommendations. TSU is the oldest higher educational institution in Georgia and also in the Caucasus region. It is the largest university in Georgia, where the best students are enrolled from all regions of Georgia. The established norms of culture, the forms of relations, the system of recognized values here extend not only to the personnel but also to the younger generations that represent the country’s significant intellectual potential. The culture they have accepted affects the cultural value system of the country in general. For analysing organizational culture we have used the analysis of its expressive components, such as history, traditions, material symbols, language; Beliefs - understanding how the goals and ideas are related to each other; Routine behaviors established in the organization; Norms shared by groups). The dominant values - the firm, long-term belief of what is important; Expectations - Understanding how events will develop in the organization; The philosophy of organizational policy that determines the attitudes towards the employees, customers (the students); Rules of the game existing in the organization; Climate of the organization; Innovation and the ability to risk; Artifacts - aspects of organizational culture that you can see, hear and feel. The work was based on the qualitative and quantitative research. We studied not only the normative grounds for determining the organizational culture, but also developed hypotheses, we made a questionnaire. 34 closed and 2 open questions were answered by survey respondents. The survey covered 458 representatives of the Faculty of Economics and Business: Bachelor’s, Master’s and PhD students, academic and administrative staff. The study has shown that a strong culture is established in the organization, it was found that the influence of the socialist system on it is very high. It needs a great effort to change if needed. It has been revealed that the culture is not managed by open methods, it is less visible that it is an immediate objective of managing management, and its primary expressions are formed as a result of the interaction of normative regulators and individual interpretations of the activity. As a result of the research it has been revealed that the attitudes of different focus groups towards the same event differ, as well as the perceptions of respondents from different categories about cultural trends in the organization. It is interesting that radically different positions have been revealed among the respondents of one category towards certain issues, which gives the basis for making important conclusions. The conducted survey is a kind of supplement to the results of the earlier research carried out by us, which deals with the issue of improving management at higher education institutions in Georgia and in the post-Soviet space in general.