ABSTRACT
A corporation is a complex interaction of many individual relationships over time, linked by a sense of a collective purpose. It is therefore dynamic and constantly changing, influenced by the social and environmental trends in the places where it operates. Companies will tend to have an espoused culture and a ‘subconscious’ culture, strongly influenced by its history and lived values. Individuals will tend to develop internal working models of ‘self’ shaped by the type of culture they experience in the workplace. It may be useful therefore to review a synthesis of some of the descriptions of different types of organisational culture, drawing on the models offered by Roger Harrison (Harrison 1972; Kakabadse and Kakabadse 1999) and the metaphors developed by Gareth Morgan (Morgan 2006) and Charles Handy (Handy 2007). Although we will consider a single culture concept we should remain mindful that within large organisations mixed cultures are often apparent. Once we have some idea of the type of culture our client operates in, constellation techniques in which key people in the organisation are represented in a relational field are likely to be very helpful for exploring ways of changing interpersonal dynamics (Horn and Brick 2005).
