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Organization’s social system is made up of two main parts:
- corporate culture, and
- social structure.
Corporate culture can be defined as those organizationally relevant norms and values shared by most employees and subgroups of employees.
Social structure is defined as the relationships that exist among employees in terms of such as power, affiliation, and trust.
Whenever people are brought together in sustained interaction, a social system emerges: a system of “informal” relationships, norms, and values.
Such system, as one of the elements in the organizational model, has its own effect on organizational processes.
For example, two organizations that are identical except their employees’ norms regarding “productivity” will generate different processes: the organization with high productivity values will produce more.
Questions to Determine the Present State of Internal Social System
1. What organizationally relevant norms exist among most employees or subgroups of employees? For example, what norms, if any, exist regarding how hard people should work and how conflicts among people should be resolved?
2. What organizationally relevant values exist among most employees or within subgroups or employees? Do any of those values relate to what the organization should be or should achieve?
3. What types of relationships exist among employees, especially regarding trust, level of cooperation, and power?
4. What types of relationships exist among natural subgroups in the organization, again regarding levels of cooperation, trust, and power?
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