The Impact Of Organisational Culture On The Performance Of Junior Secondary Schools In Oshikoto Education Region

ABSTRACT

The possibility of a school’s culture influencing school performance has triggered

wide spread research in recent years, with the introduction of organisational culture as a

field of management studying the 1970s. This topic gained the wide interest of scholars’

attention by 1980. Building from sociological and anthropological perspectives, scholars

have argued that organisations could possess a culture-which is the taken-for-granted

assumptions and behaviour that makes sense of the people’s organisational context and

therefore contributing to how groups of people respond and behave in relation to the

issues they face.

Cultural influences on organisational life can be good or bad. An ideal culture

should be that which promotes school effectiveness and efficiency as these are the most

important deliverables of performance. As can be discerned from the definition by

Johnson above, researchers have found that culture influences performance ,attitudes and

behaviour of both teachers and learners and thus builds the identity of a school. School

culture is therefore a significant component of school life that fuels the school excellence

or failure. It is thus of utmost importance for school principals and their staff to

understand their school culture and strive towards developing an exemplary and yet

inspiring culture-a culture that promotes and signifies teaching and learning through

effective school management practices.

The challenge remains with the school leadership to embrace the heterogeneous

manifestation of culture among its school inhabitants and take cognisance of the fact that

culture is volatile. The later implies that an effective organisation needs to develop a

culture that has an “intrinsic ability to adopt to changing circumstances”. The reason

The Impact of Organizational Culture on the Performance of Junior Secondary Schools

in the Oshikoto Education Region

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behind this reasoning is that this type of culture embraces fast changing trends in

performance enhancement in the dynamic world with the available resources, thus

ensuring consistency or improvement despite the unstable situations. Amidst hard

economic times and the stiff competition evident in the education sector in the twenty

first century, any institution that endeavours to survive must justify its existence through

its performance. As a result this research tries to take a range of approaches to understand

school culture, from exploring the forces that may create and change culture, to

measurements of the characteristics of a school culture and examining it as a driver of

school performance.