The Way Organizational Culture Influences Critical Thinking

For discussion of influence of organizational culture on critical thinking, we have to understand critical thinking process. Critical Thinking can be defined as active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge. Structured thinking through knowledge of Critical Thinking can be helpful in a variety of clinical conditions such as communicating with the patient, understanding the patient’s complaints and research. Critical thinking involves productive arguments, clinical reasoning and effective conclusion at the end of proper discussion supporting arguments and statements by different useful and trustworthy evidences.

When we think about effect of organizational culture on Critical thinking process, it can create both positive and negative effects on thinking process. Critical thinking within our multicultural work environment can enhance outcomes toward a productive involvement within any organization if cultural influences are addressed, and critical thinking techniques are applied correctly. It could be the positive effect of multicultural environment as a person can know about different cultures’ aspects towards problem and the critical thinking process of one can be refined in a good way. Sometimes, this type of environment can create conflicts between employees because not all employees are ready to accept other’s perspective and that can affect person’s critical thinking as the one cannot make arguments which can offend other person in his/her cultural belief. When think about cultural conditioning, it could be an asset in critical thinking during learning process because many bicultural or bilingual students appear to be proficient critical thinkers and often are able to lift the obstacles of cultural myths, mores, beliefs, or ideas. Therefore, if people recognize the role that cultural conditioning can play in individual thought processes and decision making, critical thinking can then be applied as a remedy to such biases, allowing groups to develop the best solution possible for a given situation rather than the most culturally appropriate or dominant one. For example when I was enrolled in my course in India, we had students from most different cultures. We had most patients from Hindu and Muslim community and they have their own beliefs regarding pregnancy and exercises cannot be performed during pregnancy period. Initially, we all was believing this belief only exists in these two cultures but when we discussed about with our colleagues during one seminar, we got to know this is common belief in all most all cultures and we all had different perspectives regarding that, some us still believed that it could be true, so we arranged debate on it and after that we reached to conclusion that we should aware people that this is a myth and not true at all.

So, in a way, organizational culture influences critical thinking and it could be on both sides, positive or negative.