Organizational Culture in Smu

Organizational Culture

The organizational culture in SMU is marked by its distinguished, competitive environment where students have a strong desire to gain experience, are vocal, highly motivated and versatile individuals.

Such an organizational culture is illustrated by its elements, the espoused values. SMU’s espoused values consist of SMU’s vision, mission, strategic goals and CIRCLE values . These espoused values in essence, describe the culture in SMU as a distinguished, research centered institution, with the students having the values of commitment, integrity, responsibility, collegiality, leadership and excellence.

Observable artifacts and underlying assumptions will indicate if these espoused values are enacted values. One observable artifact would be the American-style adopted as compared to the British style as seen in other Singapore universities .

The broad based education is a ritual for the students, in addition to their degree specific modules, students have to take certain compulsory modules. This illustrates that the students are more versatile as they gain exposure to different areas and do not solely focus on one single field in their tertiary years.

The interactive culture is observable during lessons, where there is a high teacher to student ratio to facilitate interaction, and students actively participate and have dialogues with the professors. To align to this, the physical structure of seminar rooms consists of seats arranged in a horseshoe formation where the professor is the focus of the room. Project works form a large percentage of the grades, as one walks around the campus, one would be able to observe Group Study Rooms filled with small teams of students working on projects. Such an environment illustrates the underlying assumptions of the interactive and holistic culture of SMU.

It is through these artifacts and underlying assumptions that build on SMU’s overall culture of being distinguishable both nationally and globally. As Dr Tony Tan said, “From its conception, SMU was designed to provide a different model of university education here in Singapore…From this starting point emerged a confluence of factors that make SMU special” .

One of the strategies that SMU has applied to strengthen its organizational culture lie in the actions of founders and leaders. There are many artifacts that are aligned to SMU’s culture, a few of which were elaborated on in the previous section. However, the underlying ground of these artifacts is the flexibility and funding of SMU, achieved by the actions of founders and leaders, which help to strengthen and further align SMU to its culture.

The founders of SMU created a vision and cultural imprint to be different from the already established NUS and NTU and thus, needs the autonomy and capability to