Thursday 26 November 2015

Edgar Shein's theory : Onion Theory



  Edgar Henry Schein(born March 5, 1928), a former professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has made a notable mark on the field of organizational development in many areas, including career development, group process consultation, and organizational culture.







Artefacts and symbols


  • Artefacts mark the surface of the organization. They are the visible elements in the organization such as 

  1. logos, 
  2. architecture, 
  3. structure, 
  4. processes and 
  5. corporate clothing. 

  • These are not only visible to the employees but also visible and recognizable for external parties.








Espoused Values

  • This concerns standards, values and rules of conduct
  • How does the organization express strategies, objectives and philosophies and 
  • how are these to made public? Problems could arise when the ideas of managers are not in line with the basic assumptions of the organization.


Basic underlying assumptions


  • The basic underlying assumptions are deeply embedded in the organizational culture and are experienced as self-evident and unconscious behaviour. Assumptions are hard to recognize from within.
  • They provide the key to understanding why things happen the way they do. These basic assumptions form around deeper dimensions of human existence  such as the human nature,human relationship and activity, reality and truth.



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