In previous lessons, you've heard me talk about culture, as activities and specific ways of doing business. Certainly culture can be characterized by looking at those types of things. But perhaps most importantly, culture can be defined by looking at the things that a company holds to be important, its ideals. Its guidelines for behavior, its norms for management, decision making, and employee conduct on a day to day basis. Here's where ideological cultural comes into play. Now, there are 10 ideological cultural artifacts in the context of organizational archaeology.

Let's look at the first three. ideological cultural traits include these artifacts, articulation and promotion of corporate mission and goals, corporate citizenship, and diversity policies. Let's look at each one in terms of articulation and promotion of the corporate mission and goals. This refers to the degree to which management regularly promotes the organization's mission and goals and ensures that employees truly understand the mission and corporate objectives. In terms of corporate citizenship, this relates to the degree to which the organization places importance on serving its community. For example, the company regularly engages in charitable, philanthropic or public service programs.

In terms of diversity policies. This relates to the existence and scope formal organizational policies, not government mandated ones, but policies that are aimed at developing and maintaining a diverse and inclusive workforce. Now, let's discuss the next three ideological cultural artifacts that you'll want to consider as part of your research. ideological cultural artifacts include employee awards and recognition, employee feedback, and employee support programs in terms of employee awards and recognition This refers to the existence, nature and frequency of awards given to employees for strong performance and other accomplishments. In terms of employee feedback, this is the extent to which there are specific communication channels between senior management employees that allow employees to recommend administrative, organizational and our strategic changes. In terms of employee support programs, this relates to the degree to which senior management exhibits concerns for employees welfare, by virtue of having employee assistance programs, and other similar provisions.

Here are the next four ideological cultural artifacts that you'll want to look at as part of your research and analysis. ideological cultural traits include ethics, external partnering, pre employment, personnel evaluations, and work life balance in the area of ethics. This relates to the extent to which management establishes and promotes formal guidelines really related to corporate ethics, and the enforcement thereof in external partnering this relates to the extent to which the organization establishes alliances and other formal relationships with outside non competitor organizations in order to advance its strategic growth objectives. In terms of pre employment personnel evaluations, this cultural trait relates to the importance that management places on policies related to pre employment assessments. These include personality tests, drug tests, technical proficiency test. And lastly, in terms of work life balance, this relates to the degree to which the organization places importance on and Institute's measures to help employees maintain a balance between their professional and personal commitments.

These descriptions of ideological culture clearly show how an organization's culture can be defined by looking at the ideals that it holds to be important and the guidelines for behavior that it establishes for employee conduct and for managerial decision making. A perfect example is the corporate mission statement of the corporate goal statement, which are designed to articulate an organization's fundamental reason for being, while establishing parameters for employee behavior and management decision making. So let's sum up with three key takeaways. ideological culture focuses on a company's fundamental beliefs and ideals. ideological culture highlights an organization's rules or guidelines for employee behavior, and ideological artifacts perhaps more than social or material artifacts strongly characterize an organization's culture. In the next lesson, we'll be looking at several key communication components that you'll want to look at as part of the process of analyzing your culture with an eye toward optimizing it for competitive advantage.