ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really
great make you feel that you, too, can become great.” -Mark Twain
One of the primary responsibilities of strategic leaders is to create and maintain the organizational
characteristics that reward and encourage collective effort. Perhaps the most fundamental of these is
organizational culture.
Organizational Leaders - are confronted with many complex issues during their attempts to generate
organizational achievements.
A leader's success will depend, to a great extent, upon understanding organizational culture.
Many of the problems confronting leaders can be traced to their inability to analyze and evaluate
organizational culture. -Schein
Difficulties with organizational transformations arise from failures to analyze an organization's existing
culture.

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE DEFINED

"A set of common understanding around which action is organized, finding expression in language
whose nuances are peculiar to the group" (Becker and Geer 1960)
"A set of understandings or meanings shared by a group of people that are largely tacit among members
and are clearly relevant and distinctive to the particular group which are also passed on to the new
members" (Louis 1980)
"A system of knowledge, standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating and acting.... that serves to relate
human communities to their environmental settings" (Allaire and Firsirotu 1984)
"The deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are: learned responses to the group's problems of
survival in its external environment and its problem of internal organization; are shared by members of an
organization" (Schein 1988)
"Any social system arising from a network of shared ideologies consisting of two components" (Trice and
Beyer 1984) Two components:
1. Substance the network of meaning associated with ideologies, norms and values
2. Forms the practices whereby the meanings are expressed, affirmed and communicated to members

Two major camps that exist in the study of organizational culture

1. First camp views culture as implicit in social life.
2. Second camp represents the view that culture is an explicit social product arising from social
interaction either as an intentional or unintentional consequence of behaviour. Also, it is most relevant to
the analysis and evaluation of organizational culture and to cultural change strategies.
Three levels of culture according to Schein (1988)
1. Behaviour and Artifacts most visible and observable level of culture, consisting of behaviour patterns
and outward manifestation of culture. All may be visible indicators of culture, but difficult to interpret
2. Values underlie to a large extent determine behaviour, but they are not directly observable, as
behaviours are.
3. Assumption and beliefs is the deepest level in which underlying assumptions grow out of values, until
they become taken for granted and drop out of awareness.

Group or cultural unit- additional aspect that complicate the study of culture in which it "owns" the
culture.
Organizational Culture is created, maintained or transformed by people. Leaders at the executive level
are the principal source of the generation and re-infusion of an organization's ideology, articulation of
core values and specification of norms.
Organizational Values express preferences for certain behaviours or certain outcomes.
Organizational Norms express behaviours accepted by others.

What relevance does organizational culture have to leaders?

One of the most perplexing issues facing leaders within the organization can be classified under one
rubric, change. Leaders in an organization are being challenged to think differently to:
1. Reconceptualize the role their organization plays
2. Reconceptualize the goad of their organization
3. Reconceptualize how people in their organizations will work together to achive goals
The term reconceptualize is emphasized here because the 21st century challenges for strategic leaders in
this country involve interpreting that appears to be the same world in radically different ways

ORGANIZATIONAL SUBCULTURE

Sociologists Gary Fine and Sherryl Kleinman discuss how distinct society are composite of interacting
subcultures rather than a single overarching culture.

Organizations consist of subgroups that have specific characteristics and a sense of identification.

Within organizations, people can easily classify themselves and others into various social
categories or groups based on identification with their primary group work, occupation or
professional skills, union member, or age cohort. (Ouchi 1980, and Ashforth and Mael 1989)
 Subgroups in organizations can do and create subcultures that compromise specific
networks and meaning; yet at the same time, they remain associated with the ideologies and
values of the organization’s leadership

A research led by Meryl Louis (louis, posner and Powell 1983) demonstrated the benefits of subgroup
interaction to newcomers “learning the ropes” of the jobs.

Survey respondents in their first job experience reported that were:

 Interaction with peers

The most important in helping newcomers to become effective employees.

 Interaction with their supervisors; and,

 Interaction with senior co-workers

“What is the content on interpersonal interaction in work settings?” asked to

get a grasp of how cultures are formed or promulgated.

Sonja Sackmann John VanMaanan and

Found that subcultures were bound to form Steven Barley

on the basis of functional domains;
Discovered that the content
principally in their biased knowledge of
of interaction is behavioral
events in the organization, in their biased
ad cognitive in nature.
explanation of cause and effect
relationships, and in their patterns of
behavior.

Organizations do not, however, always have homogeneous subculture. The explicit social products
produced by subcultures within the organizations can be widely diverse and even results in
countercultures.
 A key to a counterculture’s success
is the group’s ability to demonstrate how
Can have both
its idiosyncrasies are consonant with the
Countercultures productive and
core ideologies, values and norms of the
unproductive
dominant culture.
outcomes.

Cultures provide members with a reliable means to interpret a highly ambiguous environment. It is the
leader’s ability to specify the features of the environment that are relevant to the organization and then
provide the supporting assumptions and rationale for its operating strategies.

The leader’s cultural messages should address ambiguities that are beyond the scope of any
organizational subculture to explain to employees.

Sonja Sackmann found that the top management team “defined and framed the slice of reality in
which organizational members behave in their role as employees”

Functional subcultures shared the top manager’s conceptualization:

 How tasks were accomplished in the organization

 How employees could advance
 The ways employees related to each other
 The way adaptation and change were accomplished
 How new knowledge was acquired and perpetuated
Leaders should recognize that their cultural messages should specifically address cultural
ambiguities associated with subculture practices within the organization, and limit their attempts to
distinctions that are important to subculture’s identities.

CULTURAL FORMS

 According to Trice, cultural forms functions as the linking mechanism by which network of
understanding develop among employees.
  act as a medium for communicating ideologies, values and norms
 enable leaders to transmit messages
 address the emotional aspects of organizations
 Janice Beyer and Harrison Trice: Cultural Forms not only aid sense-making through the
meanings they convey; they also aid the sense-making process through the emotional
reassurances they provide that help people persist in their coping efforts. Forms provide a
concrete anchoring point, even if the meaning they carry are vague and only imperfectly
transmitted. Also, many cultural forms involve the expression of emotion and, by this ventine of
emotions, help people to cope with stress.
 Federal Agencies are replete with cultural forms that serve these purposes.
 Challenges of strategic leaders: creating and orchestrating cultural forms that can foster change
and have longevity beyond their tenure.
 Cultural Forms that have longevity by their nature such as rites and ceremonies reaffirm the
organization's core ideologies, values and norms.

CULTURE AND THE NEW EMPLOYEE – COMMUNICATING THE CULTURE

How can leaders detect the desirable and undesirable characteristics of organizational culture?
Productive cultural change will occur if leaders correctly analyze the organization’s existing culture, and
evaluate it against the cultural attributes needed to achieve strategic objectives.

1. Leaders must first possess a clear understanding of the strategic objectives for their
organization and identify the actions needed to reach those objectives.
2. Conduct an analysis of the organization’s existing ideologies, values and norms.
a. Are existing explanations of cause and effect relationships, and acceptable beliefs
and behaviors applicable to the organization’s achievement of strategic objectives?
b. Are organizational members facing ambiguities about the external environment and
internal work processes that can only be clarified by organizational leadership?

Formulating Strategies for Transforming Cultures in Organizations

Strategic Leadership needs to be transformational if it is to serve the organization

Transformational Leadership

 Must operate from a foundation of high morality and ethical practices

 Have a fundamental understanding of the highly complex factors that support
 Must personally act in accord with productive values and beliefs
 They must teach others to do the same
 Must promulgate the culture
The key method strategy leaders should follow to transform cultures is to teach symbolically.

 Involves the artful crafting of: new stories, new symbols, new traditions, and new humor.

Culture is deep-seated and difficult to change, but leaders can influence or manage an organization’s
culture. Cultural change isn’t easy, and it cannot be done rapidly, but leaders can have an effect on
culture.

Specific steps leaders can employ (according to Schein):

 What leaders pay attention to, measure and control?

 Where do you think people will focus their effort once it becomes accepted that a slick
presentation is what the leaders are looking for?
 Leader’s reactions to critical incidents and organizational crises.
 Deliberate role modeling, teaching and coaching.
 Criteria for allocation of rewards and status.
 Criteria for recruitment, selection, promotion and retirement.

The military academies are organizations which change over one fourth of their membership every
year, which should provide an opportunity for changes to the organizational culture as new members are
brought in. The catch is, however, is that the socialization of those new members rests in the hands of
those who are already part of the existing culture. How could the military academics make systemic
culture changes not negated by the socialization process new members go through?

 Organizational design and structure.

Modifying the organization’s basic structure may be a way of changing the existing norms, and hence the
culture. For example, a culture of mistrust between the leaders and the members of an organization may
be exacerbated by a “line” structure that discourages vertical communication.

 Organizational systems and procedures.

The simplest definition of culture is “that’s the way we do things around here.” Routines or procedures
can become so embedded that they become part of the culture, and changing the culture necessitates
changing those routines. we can all think of organizations where a weekly or month meeting takes on a
life of its own, becomes more formalized, lengthy, and elaborate, and becomes the only way information
moves within the organization. Changing the culture to improve communication may only be possible by
changing the meeting procedures or eliminating the meetings altogether.

 Design of physical space, facades, and buildings.

The impact of the design of buildings on culture can easily be illustrated by considering the executive
perks in an organization

 Stories about important events and people.

This is a way of perpetuating culture in an organization, in that it helps define and solidify the
organization’s identity. By what events and stories they emphasize, leaders influence that identity.

 Formal statements of organizational philosophy, creeds, and charts.

This is the way leaders most often try to influence their organizations, and encompasses the vision or
mission statement and statement of the organization’s (or the leader’s) values and philosophy. By
themselves, however, formal statements will have little effect on the organization’s culture. They must be
linked to actions to affect culture.