Organisational culture represents a common perception held by the organisation’s members
(Robbins 1996). In the process of working together, some distinctive beliefs, norms, values and practices, among others, tend to emerge that long standing organisational members internalise and like to indoctrinate new comers into (Khandwalla 1992) and in the process become institutionalised (Evan et al., 1988; Zucker 1981; Pareek 1981; Meyer et al., 1977).
An individual at the ‘entry’ point of his career as a fresher, or joining the services of another organisation at a later point of time, comes to know the ‘three P’s’ of behaviour pattern, namely, ‘prescribed’, ‘permitted’, and ‘prohibited’ appropriate to his position in the organisation. As Lewin (1947) holds, a person enters an organisation to accept its influences, to be pervaded by its values and to identify with it and to shed those attitudes and values that would be discordant. The individual learns to ‘internalize’ or gets ‘indoctrinated’ through interaction with others. Bakke (1953) in a similar vein, opines that every person entering into an organisation must be moulded to some degree into the ‘image’ of the organisation. This process, he labels as the ‘formal socialising process’. Though individuals with divergent personal aims try to impose their image on the formal organisation, which process is termed as ‘the personalising process’, both the ‘socialising process’ and ‘personalising processs’ merge or fuse. Bakke calls this the ‘fusion process’.