Organizational change and the importance and the state of organizational culture in organizational change

Xll ABSTRACT The aim of this thesis is to search for organizational culture and the role of organizational culture in organizational change. In the first part of the thesis, definitions of organizational culture are given. Also in this part, characteristics, functions and relation between similar concepts of organizational culture are mentioned. The second part of this thesis is about organizational change. Organizational change has lots of aims such as productivity and efficiency that are mentioned in this part. In addition, the subject of resistance to change is examined to understand the change. Besides these, the model of change, practices of change, approaches of organizational change and practices of change in today's organizations are discussed. In the third part of the thesis, relation between organizational culture and organizational change is explained. This part is also about the benefits of organizational culture, learning and developing of organizational culture, management of organizational culture, cultural change and success of organizational change in cultural context. A research about the subject takes place in the fourth part of the thesis. The aim of the research is to determine employees' perceptions of organizational culture and their attitudes toward organizational change, and to find the differences through the demographic properties and between the branches of the bank. For this research, a questionnaire is applied as a data collection technique. This questionnaire involves the questions about perceptions of organizational culture inspired by Litwin and Stringer's questionnaire, attitudes to organizational change developed by Turhan Erkmen and demographic properties. According to the result of this research, there is a relationship between employees' perceptions of culture and attitudes toward change. Also the people who are working in the bank have positive perceptions of organizational culture and positive attitudes to organizational change. Key Words: Organizational Culture, Organizational Change, Cultural Change, Management of Organizational Change and Culture.