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Introduction Culture is a phenomenon that surrounds us all and it is the personality, assumptions, values, norms and tangible signs of organization members and their behaviors. Culture is a term that is difficult to express distinctly, but the feeling of knowing it is coupled with the feeling of sensing it. By contrast, the culture of a for-profit corporation is quite different than that of a non-profit organization. Corporate culture could also be viewed at as a system. Inputs include feedback from, for example, the social order, laws, and ideals on competition or service. The process is based on an individual’s assumptions, values and norms and the outputs of culture are, for example, organizational behaviors, technologies, strategies, products, services and the list goes on. The concept of culture is particularly important when attempting to manage organizational change. Culture provides cues and clues on how to behave in normal and novel situations, thereby making the aviation industry less uncertain and more predictable for all and sundry. Senior management practitioners are coming to realize that, despite the best-laid plans, organizational change must include not only changing structures and processes, but changing the corporate culture as well. Organizational change efforts are rumored to fail the vast majority of the time. Usually, this failure is credited to lack of understanding about the strong role of culture and the role it plays in any aviation organizations. But organizations nowadays are investing time, money and effort to understand and implement safety culture. This essay would focus on the influence of culture on productivity and safety in aviation organizations and the senior management’s role in ensuring safety outcomes. Discussion The word culture is being used a great deal in aviation. “Organizational culture refers to the deep structure of organizations, which is rooted in the values, beliefs and assumptions held by organisation members whereas organizational climate, in contrast, portrays organizational environments as being rooted in the organization’s value system, but tends to present these social environments in relatively static terms, describing them in terms of a fixed set of dimensions.” (Denison, 1996, p. 625). In addition to accepting the influence of national, organizational and occupational cultures, senior management practitioners of the aviation industry are now advocating a safety culture. There are two important and distinct components of culture. The outer layer of culture consists of observable behaviors and recognizable physical manifestations such as members' uniforms, signs and logos, and documents. The inner layer of culture consists of the values, beliefs and assumptions, which underlie the surface structure and provide the logic, which guide the members' behaviors (Hayward & Lowe, 2000). Cultural errors occur when people interpret the facade structure of another culture from the knothole of their own cultural perspective.
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