Browsing by Subject "Organisational culture"

Now showing 1 - 7 of 7
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    Compassion in organizations: sensemaking and embodied experience in emergent relational capability. A phenomenological study in South African human service organizations
    (2015) Train, Katherine Judith; April, Kurt
    Compassion in organizations is researched as a three-stage process of collective noticing another's pain, empathic concern or feeling another's pain and taking action to ease their suffering, and is ascribed to the orchestration of spontaneous individual acts of compassion in accordance with specific organizational architecture. Situations with limited resources leading to resource exhaustion require further studies to address the risks and liabilities of compassion organizing (Dutton, Worline, Frost, & Lilius, 2006). South African human service organizations face resource limitations within a challenged socio-economic environment. Given these limitations, agents may experience personal distress limiting the capacity for compassion. This study examines agent capacities required for compassion capability in South African human service organizations. The research applies the ontological lens of enaction, an interpretive design, and the descriptive phenomenological method in psychology (Giorgi, 2009), adapted for human science in organizations. Data was collected, with semi-structured interviews, as concrete descriptions of experiences, from thirty-three participants, from five organizations. Eleven participants underwent multiple interviews. Intensity sampling was applied to gain understanding of information-rich cases that were intense but not extreme, maximum variation sampling to access primary themes across a range of service providers. Texts, as transcriptions of audio recordings, were analyzed applying the phenomenological reduction to search for invariant organizational behavioural meanings. Texts were read for a sense of the whole; broken down to meaning units; and transformed to phenomenological expressions of meaning. Descriptions of experiences were categorized according to empathic concern or personal distress, like experiences were grouped by organization as units of description. Units of description were compared between the organizations. The key findings were that compassion in organizations characterized by resource limitation requires special attention, particularly when agent and client share common experiences of adversity, initiating experiences of personal distress. The overcoming of personal distress requires agent capacities of individual and participatory sensemaking: identifying reaction, identifying non-verbal cues in self and other; engaging capacities of emoting, intending and urging. Sustainable practice of compassion is characterized by the intention to facilitate new sensemaking of the experience of the suffering, witnessing the suffering as well as the alleviation of suffering.
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    Open Access
    Does one size fit all? exploring the effect of hearing aid impulse noise reduction on isiXhosa click sounds: a pilot study
    (2025) Stephan, Heinrich Rudolph; Petersen, Lucretia; Hlayisi, Vera-Genevey
    Gender diversity remains a significant challenge in the Information Technology (IT) industry, particularly in South Africa, where the workforce composition does not reflect the nation's demographic diversity. This disparity results in the underrepresentation of women despite policies aimed at fostering inclusion. Existing research highlights a decline in women's participation in the IT sector but often overlooks the perceptions and treatment of women within IT workplaces. This study investigates women's experiences working in Agile project environments in South African IT companies. Agile is a popular software development methodology emphasizing collaboration, communication, and collective decision-making. Using intersectionality theory, this cross-sectional study examines how gender and background factors affect women's work performance. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews with twenty-five women IT professionals recruited via snowball sampling. Key findings indicate that gender discrimination persists in Agile environments. The study revealed that South African women in Agile project environments exist within a male- dominated, Gendered Organisational Culture, which privileges behaviours and actions that benefit men. Women in these environments often experience feelings of inadequacy due to their minority status in predominantly male teams. Other specific persistent issues emerged such as gendered recognition bias, gender pay gap, job insecurity, lack of support for motherhood, work-life balance, and scarcity of women mentors. The study further reveals that the high attrition rate of women in IT is not due to the technical demands of the roles but rather the negative impact of organisational culture and gender bias on their professional development. The study's limitations include its reliance on a small, non-random sample, which may not fully represent the broader population. Additionally, the focus on Agile environments may limit the generalizability of the findings to other IT settings. Future research should explore the intersection of gender with other factors, such as socioeconomic status and motherhood, providing a more comprehensive understanding of the barriers women face in IT. It should also investigate strategies to create more inclusive and supportive workplace cultures.
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    Exploring the introduction of a complex intervention in primary health care facilities in the Western Cape: A single site exploratory case study of the C²AIR² club challenge
    (2017) Mphaphuli, Edzani Brenda; Gilson, Lucy
    Context: The Western Cape Province's Department of Health, South Africa, implemented a complex intervention aimed at changing organisational culture across health facilities in the province called the C²AIR² club challenge, in phases, starting from August 2013 and was still ongoing in 2016 at the time of the research. A group of front-line staff from each participating health facility called C²AIR² club champions were capacitated to implement the intervention in their respective facilities. This study aimed to explored the process of introduction, diffusion, adoption and implementation of the C²AIR² club challenge in one of the primary health facilities where the challenge was implemented, using a diffusion of innovation lens. Methods: We examined the process of implementing the C²AIR² club and the contextual and other factors that constrained and enabled this process. Working in one primary health care facility selected as a representative case, we explored the experiences of the champions and other staff members of the C²AIR² club. Our methods included 21 in-depth interviews, informal conversations, document review, and non-participant observation. Results: Innovation-fit, leadership, champions, adopters' characteristics, and contextual issues were the main factors that influenced the spread of the C²AIR² club. Contextual issues particularly those related to resource constraints played a central role in determining the successful spread of the complex organisational culture change intervention. Sufficiently trained champions could successfully spread the intervention without onsite external change consultants' facilitation, however this took time and caution should be taken not to evaluate implementation success too early. Involvement of not only top leadership but of all other multi-levels and multi-disciplines facilitated the spread of the intervention. Conclusions: When introducing an innovation like the C²AIR² club challenge the impact of which is not immediate neither tangible, in an organisation where there are tangible problems such as lack of working space, staff shortages and shortages in working equipment, it is important that efforts are made to address these immediate challenges and where they cannot be addressed that this is openly acknowledged by the implementers and management. If this is not considered, organisational members are likely to acknowledge the innovation as a good initiative but one that they would not actively rally around as it does not speak to their problems.
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    Exploring the relationship between organisational culture, brand, and word-of-mouth referral
    (2019) Farmer-Brent, Garret; Irwin, Ronald
    The culture within an organisation affects organisational performance in a myriad of ways, but the existing research was found by this paper to only examine organisational culture’s effect on profitability. This narrow view creates a gap between culture as a starting point for performance, and profitability as an ultimate endpoint. What about everything in between that culture has an effect on? Rather than examining organisational culture in terms of how it influences profitability, this study looks at how organisational culture influences an aspect organisational performance, specifically: its effect on brand image or on word-of-mouth referral. To do so, this paper unpacks a causal chain of influences in four chapters. The research here shows how that employees situated within the culture influences customers to promise to refer the organisation to their social connections. The literature shows that organisational culture is a context that influences most facets of business, and this context is used as a filter by employees to understand how they should behave and what they should value. This paper proposes that employees receive internal brand communications within the context of the culture. Then, they conduct their service actions according to what is expected of them within this context. Customers who interact with these employees are then coming into contact with the organisational by the proxy of customer-facing employees. These interactions between customers and employees are what causes the customer to enjoy the service experience or not. The theory shows that when a service experience is enjoyed, there is likelihood of positive word-of-mouth referral. This paper correlates that and proposes that when there is a strong degree of alignment in organisational culture, employees receive internal brand communications and conduct their service actions in strong alignment of what is expected of them. This leads to customers perceiving the organisation in a way that is favourable and causes a significant number of customers to promise to recommend the organisation.
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    Organisational culture and trust as influences over the implementation of equity-oriented policy in two South African case study hospitals
    (2017) Erasmus, Ermin; Gilson, Lucy; Govender, Veloshnee; Nkosi, Moremi
    BACKGROUND: This paper uses the concepts of organisational culture and organisational trust to explore the implementation of equity-oriented policies - the Uniform Patient Fee Schedule (UPFS) and Patients' Rights Charter (PRC) - in two South African district hospitals. It contributes to the small literatures on organisational culture and trust in low- and middle-income country health systems, and broader work on health systems' people-centeredness and "software". METHODS: The research entailed semi-structured interviews (Hospital A n = 115, Hospital B n = 80) with provincial, regional, district and hospital managers, as well as clinical and non-clinical hospital staff, hospital board members, and patients; observations of policy implementation, organisational functioning, staff interactions and patient-provider interactions; and structured surveys operationalising the Competing Values Framework for measuring organisational culture (Hospital A n = 155, Hospital B n = 77) and Organisational Trust Inventory (Hospital A n = 185, Hospital B n = 92) for assessing staff-manager trust. RESULTS: Regarding the UPFS, the hospitals' implementation approaches were similar in that both primarily understood it to be about revenue generation, granting fee exemptions was not a major focus, and considerable activity, facility management support, and provincial support was mobilised behind the UPFS. The hospitals' PRC paths diverged quite significantly, as Hospital A was more explicit in communicating and implementing the PRC, while the policy also enjoyed stronger managerial support in Hospital A than Hospital B. Beneath these experiences lie differences in how people's values, decisions and relationships influence health system functioning and in how the nature of policies, culture, trust and power dynamics can combine to create enabling or disabling micro-level implementation environments. CONCLUSIONS: Achieving equity in practice requires managers to take account of "unseen" but important factors such as organisational culture and trust, which are key aspects of the organisational context that can profoundly influence policies. In addition to implementation "hardware" such as putting in place necessary staff and resources, it emphasises "software" implementation tasks such as relationship management and the negotiation of values, where equity-oriented policies might be interpreted as challenging health workers' status and values, and paying careful attention to how policies are practically framed and translated into practice, to ensure key equity aspects are not neglected.
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    Organisational culture and trust as influences over the implementation of equity-oriented policy in two South African case study hospitals
    (BioMed Central, 2017-09-15) Erasmus, Ermin; Gilson, Lucy; Govender, Veloshnee; Nkosi, Moremi
    Background: This paper uses the concepts of organisational culture and organisational trust to explore the implementation of equity-oriented policies – the Uniform Patient Fee Schedule (UPFS) and Patients’ Rights Charter (PRC) - in two South African district hospitals. It contributes to the small literatures on organisational culture and trust in low- and middle-income country health systems, and broader work on health systems’ people-centeredness and “software”. Methods: The research entailed semi-structured interviews (Hospital A n = 115, Hospital B n = 80) with provincial, regional, district and hospital managers, as well as clinical and non-clinical hospital staff, hospital board members, and patients; observations of policy implementation, organisational functioning, staff interactions and patient-provider interactions; and structured surveys operationalising the Competing Values Framework for measuring organisational culture (Hospital A n = 155, Hospital B n = 77) and Organisational Trust Inventory (Hospital A n = 185, Hospital B n = 92) for assessing staff-manager trust. Results: Regarding the UPFS, the hospitals’ implementation approaches were similar in that both primarily understood it to be about revenue generation, granting fee exemptions was not a major focus, and considerable activity, facility management support, and provincial support was mobilised behind the UPFS. The hospitals’ PRC paths diverged quite significantly, as Hospital A was more explicit in communicating and implementing the PRC, while the policy also enjoyed stronger managerial support in Hospital A than Hospital B. Beneath these experiences lie differences in how people’s values, decisions and relationships influence health system functioning and in how the nature of policies, culture, trust and power dynamics can combine to create enabling or disabling micro-level implementation environments. Conclusions: Achieving equity in practice requires managers to take account of “unseen” but important factors such as organisational culture and trust, which are key aspects of the organisational context that can profoundly influence policies. In addition to implementation “hardware” such as putting in place necessary staff and resources, it emphasises “software” implementation tasks such as relationship management and the negotiation of values, where equity-oriented policies might be interpreted as challenging health workers’ status and values, and paying careful attention to how policies are practically framed and translated into practice, to ensure key equity aspects are not neglected.
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    Towards an interactive management approach to performance improvement in bureaucratic organization
    (2002) Tuan, Nien-Tsu; Ryan, Tom
    Organization science is not a new discipline. However, it persistently attracts many researchers to explore new concepts for coping with the increasing complexity in our society. The exploration is in transition, from mechanistic doctrine to systemic and humanistic notions. The mechanistic view is still prevailing and playing a dominant role, but, owing to its increasing critics, appeals for renovation of mechanistic principle incessantly arise. The tendency induces diversified approaches for intervening in the situation of bureaucratic context. This research investigates the features of organization from three angles - on the one hand, the structure and process (functional) aspects, and on the other, the purposeful behaviour of humans. Many works see the three components as separate, and deal with them accordingly. However, we contend that the three aspects are interrelated and that they should be integrated. The integration suggests that multiple views of organization are adequate because it embodies the attributes of purposeful behaviour and functional characteristics. Problems within an organization can be seen as the mutual influence of these parts. They can mutually aggravate and impede the performance of an organization. On the one hand, we contend that bureaucratic organization is inadequate, owing to its fragility in functional components of processing information to adapt to environment change. On the other hand, its rigid essence causes an inability to deal with human dimension problems. The problematical elements present a systemic relation. In turn, we attempt to explore the essence of organization's complex problems. The exploration concludes that both complexity and problems are cognitive phenomena. The illustrations suggest that the unearthing of organization problems should be grounded in the 'interaction' and 'consensus' 'model interchanging' of stakeholders. Based on this idea, we propose an intervention framework for diagnosing pathological pattern within bureaucratic organization. The framework is applied to one of South Africa's biggest local governments (the City of Tygerberg). The research result shows that the most significant problem within the City of Tygerberg is in the information-processing subsystem- associator. Besides, the 'mental pathology' locates on the 'sink' stage of the structured problem model.