Annals of the „Constantin Brâncuşi” University of Târgu Jiu, Economy Series, Issue 3/2019 „ACADEMICA BRÂNCUŞI” PUBLISHER, ISSN 2344 – 3685/ISSN-L 1844 - 7007 THE EMPLOYEE PERCEPTION ON THE IMPORTANCE OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE FOR THE FUTURE OF AN ENTERPRISE CIUREA JEANINA LECTURER PHD., UNIVERSITY ”EFTIMIE MURGU” OF REȘIȚA e-mail: j.ciurea@uem.ro DEMYEN SUZANA LECTURER PHD., UNIVERSITY ”EFTIMIE MURGU” OF REȘIȚA e-mail: s.demyen@uem.ro Abstract The present paper aims at illustrating the role of organizational culture for the future of an enterprise. It consists in two main parts, the first one is a theoretical part which presents the main models of organizational culture that can be identified in literature, while the second part presents a study carried out by the authors, with the purpose of illustrating the perception of employees upon the importance of organizational culture as a determinant of success or failure of the enterprise. Keywords: organizational culture, employee, enterprise, organizational objective JEL : D23, M14 1. Introduction Organizational culture represents the personality of an organization, also its source of power (Deal, Kennedy, in [7]), but which may in some cases constitute the source of its decline or failure. Literature is extensive in this field, organizational culture being not only an essential branch of human resource management but also a stand-alone discipline that provides prerequisites for the development of many studies, being a concept with a broad, fundamental applicability to define and explain mechanisms of an organization. „Organizational culture has become an important topic for analyzing economic performance since the 80s of last century”. Defining organizational culture was conducted from multiple perspectives [1]. Whether we consider organizational culture as "a dominant and coherent set of values shared by members of the organization, induced by symbolic means" (Peters, Watterman in [4]) or "a set of symbols, beliefs and patterns of learned behavior, recreated by people who devote their energy and work to an organization's life" (Strati), the one that describes in the best way the concept is Geert Hofstede who refers to organizational culture as "a collective mental programming that distinguishes members of an organization from members of another one" [5]. Homburg and Ptlesse (2000) [6], develop a model with four components: values, rules of orientation towards market, artifacts of orientation towards market and market-oriented behaviors, all of which determine the performance of the organization, with consequences for market dynamism. Briefly, we can say that organisational culture “refers to a system of shared meanings held by members of an organisation that distinguishes them from others” (Robbins, 2001, in [8]), an “ideology of the organization” [11]. The range of definitions offered by both national and international literature is extremely wide, with the main coordinates identified in relation to this aspect being the following: 237