Cultural Approach to Organization Theory

In high school I was on the basketball team, in which we had our own little culture where everything was somehow centered around basketball. Every year the coaches had a ritual where they would make up slogans to show people what the basketball team stood for. During my senior year, our slogan was doing good deeds to help someone else on the team. Every winter when we had tryouts for the team, the coaches made their cuts and additions. After tryouts were over, we had a team meeting and went over the team rules, an example of corporate stories, stories that carry the ideology of management and reinforce company policy (our company being the Spartan Basketball team). In the same year, we had to share a personal story (stories that company personnel tell about themselves, often defining how they would like to be seen in the organization) and collegial story (positive or negative anecdotes told about others in the organization) to the new guy on the team. I shared with the player I was teamed up with something that happened the previous year during basketball season. I told him that we got a new assistant coach who everyone thought was an asshole. He would try to enforce corporate culture on the new guys, always yelling at players for know reason at all. By him being that way, it hurt the established culture of our team and his presence seemed to make us a less organizational culture. I told the new player that in order to be successful on the court, we needed to be a professional family, staying above any drama and never letting what anyone else said bring us down as a team. When the season was over, the new guy told me that my story helped him during the season, and he never once forgot what the team stood for, and did not anything get in the way of what was best for the organization.