Artifacts in Organizational Culture

Community colleges and universities all over the world are continually seeking new methods for enhancing the team environment within the corporate infrastructure. Several decades ago college campuses were not as eager to group students together for the sake of becoming lifelong learners; instead students relied on the pure solitude of individualism. Students were forced to take on more responsibilities and completed tasks all by themselves or with the assistance of a tutor or mentor. Consequently, students ended up cramming excessive amounts of information at the last minute in order to pass exams, which ultimately resulted in mental overload whereas students did not retain even half of the information they studied, which only illustrates that the previous educational model was not as effective as it could have been. Nevertheless, the need to research potential methodologies for enhancing the previous learning model was in effect. In essence the previous learning curve was slightly skewed for the reason that students were gaining practical theoretical knowledge of critical course concepts however, students were unable to apply those concepts because they lacked adequate training on functioning within the corporate framework. Colleges at that time needed to increase the measure of effectiveness and efficiency of student development by setting the example for other campuses to follow. Colleges and/or universities have been widely known for providing students with extracurricular activities that would allow students to become part of a team environment and to build a foundation of principles that is geared towards embracing culture, cultural change, community service or volunteering. In an ongoing effort to improve upon established processes, colleges felt the need to parlay extracurricular activity concepts of team building inside the classroom and into external environments which is ultimately where a graduate student will spend most of his/her time in society. As time progressed colleges desired to focus more on training students on professional demeanor within an organization, organizational behavior and how to quickly adjust to cultural changes.

Artifact #1: "The concept of corporate character was first introduced into the culture literature by Wilkins (1989), who saw it as a component of culture consisting of "shared vision," "motivational faith" that things would be fair and that abilities would be used, and "distinctive skills," both overt and tacit. In his view, "building character" was possible by emphasizing programs dealing with each of the components, but he did not build a typology around the dimensions." (Schein, 2004). Corporate character is the foundation behind a university's reason for existing. This artifact coincides with the way most colleges facilitate learning in addition to extending the learning model with real life or real world examples. Currently, every organization depends upon a unified regime of versatility consisting of a diverse range of cultural collaboration of innovative concepts that might not take form quickly on an individual bases.