Intensive Care Organizational Culture

What shapes the way a unit or a place of employment behaves is their organizational culture. According to del Bueno (1986) Organizational culture is a “Combination of the symbols, language, assumptions and behaviors that overtly manifest and organizations norms and values” (Thomas, 2017). An organization’s culture can be positive and beneficial to a unit, but also negative and destructive. This is because it leads to a powerful level of guiding behavior that involves people monitoring each other. There are different levels of culture that an organization can hold. The most superficial level are things that are visible to a non-member, something that you can pick up on by walking on the unit, without having to be primarily included. Within

The Neuro side holds about ten patient beds and has a lower patient census. Typically you can always find the charge nurse, medical students, and physicians by the nurse’s station. There is only one nurses station and it is built in a circular shape, so everyone is somewhat facing each other. The unit is relatively calm and quiet. You will occasionally hear distant conversations between nurses and physicians, sometimes-informal conversations. The Intensive Care Unit side is much larger and there are about eighteen patient rooms. It is normal to see rounds occurring with the multi-disciplinary team, which includes Pharmacists, Nurses, Physicians, Dieticians, and Social Workers. It is much more crowded and there are three nurses station throughout the

During informal conversations you will hear about co-workers making plans outside of work or recapping on a fun weekend outing. Social outings are predominantly kept in between professions. For example, nurses will hangout with other nurses. There are some social isolation between the newer nurses and senior nurses. According to Marquis (2017), an organizations culture functions as an “immune system”; it keeps out the wrong people from entering the organization. It is not necessarily that these new employees are the wrong type of people but they haven’t completely adapted to the ways of this unit. In some ways this can be a problem because the senior staff can prevent the needed or good change that some of the newer staff might want to bring in (Marquis,