Organisational Culture
RMIT University
Slide 1
Organisational Culture
Objectives:
• Assignment One
• Review of course: Why are we doing this?
– How can different perspectives help me in the future?
• Introduce the concepts of culture, norms and values.
• Discuss how these concepts relate to organisations.
• Distinguish between contemporary theoretical approaches to
organisational culture
– Modern
– Symbolic interpretive
– Critical theory
– Postmodern
RMIT University
Slide 2
Assignment One
The Question To Be Answered:
'What managers most often want to know about their
organization's culture is how to change it......But what is
recommended to managers on the basis of culture theory
differs markedly according to the perspectives adopted' (Hatch
and Cunliffe, 2013: 185).
Choose two of the four perspectives and discuss their different views
on organisational culture and how their advice to managers who are
seeking to influence organisational culture might be different.
RMIT University
Slide 3
Assignment One
Two questions to answer:
•Why and how do each perspective provide different
insights into the nature of organisational culture?
•How do the insights of each perspective lead to different
recommendations to managers on how they might go about
changing organisational culture?
RMIT University
Slide 4
Assignment One
• You must focus explicitly on the key issues identified in the
question.
• You must consider at least two of the four perspectives.
• You must make use of required readings.
• A failure to follow this and the instructions in the assignment guide
will have a significant negative impact on your marks.
RMIT University
Slide 5
Why are we doing this?
How will these four perspectives
help me in the future?
Rewind: Week One
What is this course about?
Upon Successful Completion of the course you will be able to:
•
Identify, understand and interpret a range of organisational theories and
concepts that contribute to the management of contemporary organisations
•
Critically evaluate theories and practices in organisations to support decisions
and actions and select and apply relevant theories to develop solutions to
problems in contemporary organisations
•
Understand, critically discuss and apply key organisational theories to issues
arising from diverse cultural, economic, historical, philosophical and social
and environmental contexts
•
Communicate ideas, intentions and outcomes clearly to a variety of audiences
Fast-forward: 5 Years
Scenario:
You have secured a position as a department manager.
First day on the job you learn:
– The company is in financial difficulties.
–
Your department is seen as underperforming.
– Former management team of the department resigned. Some department
members tell you they resigned due to their treatment from senior management.
–
Senior management of the company tell you the ‘culture’ of the department is
the problem and that it will have to be dealt with as a matter of priority.
OT to the rescue?
What is organisational culture?
How should I choose to think about:
–
–
–
–
Organisational culture?
Senior Management’s position?
The department?
My role in the department?
What are the implications of different perspectives
for making different management decisions?
What is Culture?
The totality of learned ideas, values,
knowledge, normative behaviours,
rules and customs shared and passed
down by a group of people through
language, symbols and artifacts.
Culture
Norms and Values
Norm:
– A common expectation and/or prescription for
social behaviour within a given context.
Values:
– The central beliefs and purposes of an
individual, group of individuals, organisation
or society.
Organisational Culture
‘comprises the deep, basic assumptions
and beliefs, as well as the shared values,
that define organisational membership, as
well as the members’ habitual ways of
making decisions, and presenting
themselves and their organisation to those
who come into contact with it’ (Clegg,
Kornberger and Pitsis, 2008: 224).
Schein’s Levels of Organisational
Culture - Modernist
Three Components of Culture in Organisations
Level 1: Artifacts: Visible organisational features (buildings,
uniforms, interior design, brand images).
Level 2: Values: non-visible facets of organisational culture
(norms and beliefs)
Level 3: Basic Assumptions (Core) largely unconscious
and tacit frames that shape values and artifacts formed
through and out of particular social relationships
•
Shapes decision-making processes ‘invisibly’
Schein’s Levels of Organisational
Culture
Structure that shapes us via socialisation and acculturation (processes)
The Complexities of Organisational
Culture
Corporate Culture: top down
– The dominant culture (values, artifacts, rules, norms, etc.) put forward by top
management.
– May or may not be widely supported by organisational members.
Subcultures: bottom up
– Diverse cultures found within an organisation whose members view themselves
as distinctly different. Other subcultures also view them as distinctly different.
• Enhancing subcultures (advocate for dominate corporate culture).
• Orthogonal subcultures (express a view that is neither supportive or threatening of
dominant culture)
• Countercultures (hold values, norms and attitudes that challenge dominant corporate
culture)
The Complexities of Organisational
Culture
Organisational Culture composed of all the subcultures: not
a single monolithic entity
Corporate culture only one of the many sub-cultures: an
imposed tool of management: the dominant subculture?
Subcultures within organisations can contribute to or rival
organisational attempts to reproduce dominant identities
and culture.
Where do organisational sub-cultures reside?
Occupational groupings
Departments or teams
Hierarchical divisions
‘Old’ or ‘new’ segments or departments
Organisational Identity
• Corporate cultures are a way for organisations to shape
their organisational identities.
• Organisational identities= those artifactual attributes, familiar signs,
symbols and routines that corporations use to create a particular
public ‘image’.
The public image/identity is a composite of physical structural
components and culture.
• Gagliardi’s fan model identifies instrumental strategies and
expressive strategies as aspects of organisational identities
• Hatch’s cultural dynamics model takes the fan model one step
further by focussing on the process rather than the components.
• Bakan anthropomorphises identity e.g. like an old man
RMIT University
Slide 18
Culture, Identity and Image
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Slide 19
Hatch’s cultural dynamic model
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Slide 20
Modernist Approach
Organisational culture is ‘real’ – structural reality
Organisational culture(s) is a variable that can
impact upon organisational performance.
Organisational culture can enable or constrain
organisational effectiveness & capacity to bring
about change.
Modernist Approach; A management
tool?
• Culture amenable to change? Evidence from
industry – acculturation of externally sourced CEOs – rather than
them changing existing culture – as was intended.
Modernist Approach
Kotter and Heskett (1992) Corporate Culture and
Performance
Research question: Does organisational culture
impact on organisational performance?
Modernist Approach
Kotter and Heskett (1992) Corporate Culture and Performance
Research Design
– Surveyed managers and financial analysts of 200 corporations
– Surveys included a range of questions and variables aimed at
measuring ‘cultural strength’ and cultural values as well as
organisational performance (e.g. financial viability).
Quantitative Analysis
– Measured the strength of the correlation between corporate culture and
organisational performance and organisational adaptation/change.
Results
– There is a positive correlation between organisational performance and
the strength of corporate culture.
– When corporate cultures demonstrated to be weak organisational
performance was reduced.
National cultural Influences
• Geert Hofstede’s IBM study identified five key variables
•
•
•
•
•
Power distance – accept or reject inequality
Uncertainty avoidance – accept avoid risk taking
Individualism versus collectivism
Masculine versus feminine
Long-term versus short –term orientation
• These vary from national culture to national culture and
are important to those managing MNCs and TNCs.
RMIT University
Slide 25
Implications for management
practice
If we can understand organisational culture and national cultural
differences management can use that knowledge to achieve certain
outcomes (e.g. improve organisational efficiency and effectiveness).
Objective is to create and unify an organisational culture so that it
aligns with organisational goals.
Mechanisms for organisation acculturation:
– ‘Team-building’ exercises
– Corporate sponsored social events
Symbolic Interpretive Approaches
– Culture is ‘real’ – socially constructed and objectified
– Interpretation and meaning making occurs through
culture(s).
– Taking part in ‘organisational’ life and culture is like
fulfilling a part in a theatrical play.
• Organisations have scripts to ‘perform’
• Organisational members (actors) perform an organisational
role within this script.
• Organisational success or failure is partially determined by
the capacity to perform the script and have good actors.
Symbolic interpretive approach
Investigating Organisational Culture
Qualitative data gathering
– Participant observation (‘going native’)
– Ethnography (observation, focus groups, indepth interviews).
Qualitative analysis
– Thematic and narrative analysis
Results:
– ‘thick description’ (Geertz) & interpretation of the dynamics of
organisational culture.
Symbolic interpretive approach
Organisational Acting & Emotional Labour
• Hochschild’s The Managed Heart:
Commercialisation of Human Feeling (1983):
– First to develop the notion of ‘emotional labour’
– Emotional labour is characterised as:
‘a covert resource, like money or knowledge, or physical
labour, which companies need to get the job done’
(Hochschild:1983).
Symbolic interpretive approach
Organisational Acting & Emotional Labour
The individual actor:
• Hochschild uses the example of flight attendants and bill collectors
to show how people are constrained to maintain emotions in their
work:
– Friendliness of flight attendant
– Suspension of trust and sympathy for the debt-collector.
The organisational script and collective emotional labour:
‘it is not simply individuals who manage their feelings in order to do a
job; whole organisations have entered the game. The emotion
management that keeps the smile on Delta Airlines competes with the
emotion management that keeps the same smile on United and TWA’
(1983: 185-6).
Implications for management
practice
Symbolic-interpretive:
– If we understand culture and the cultural meaning of behaviours,
verbal and non-verbal communication, symbols and objects, we
come to understand ourselves, others and our interaction with
others more fully.
– This knowledge can enable managers to engage more
effectively with diverse cultures and sub-cultures within and
external to organisations – facilitate institutionalisation.
– Enable organisational actors to better negotiate order – facilitate
cooperation.
Implications for management practice:
Understanding Narratives and Dramaturgy
The need to direct the Script & Train the Actors:
Critical Theorists
Theoretical position: culture is real
– ‘Organisational culture’ is ideological.
– Organisational culture is an attempt to
‘manufacture consent’ and pacify consumers,
organisational members and others that the
organisation depends upon.
Critical Theorists
• Organisational culture as manipulation:
Critical Theorists
Theoretical position:
• Modernist understanding of ‘culture’ is too
simplistic.
• Organisational culture not be manufactured
and/or easily controlled by management.
• Organisational members become very cynical
and suspicious of management attempts to
‘manufacture’ a culture.
Implications for management
practice
Critical theorists:
– ‘Poor’ organisational culture is a potential sign of
‘poor’ management.
– Managing ‘culture’ should not be the focus of
management practice.
– Improving management processes and procedures should be
the priority (e.g. better involvement of organisational members in
decision-making processes) – employee empowerment –
employee participation industrial democracy.
Postmodernist Approaches
Calling Organisational Culture into
Question:
– Postmodernists challenge the idea that
organisations have cultures.
– The notion that members of an organisation
share a culture is an illusion.
Postmodernist Approaches
– Corporate ‘culture’ is conceptualised within
postmodern notions of power and the
contestation of power – need to deconstruct
this.
Postmodern Approaches
Organisational Culture & Power
– Corporate ‘culture’ is part and parcel of organisational
narratives that seek to legitimise authority and
marginalise other voices.
– Organisational members, however, recite and create
different narratives with different audiences resulting
in a polyphony of competing and incoherent ‘stories’
being told simultaneously within an organisation.
• Organisations as soap opera not theater.
Implications for management
practice
Postmodernism:
• Requires us to recognise, ‘listen’ to, and critically reflect upon
dominant and marginalised organisational narratives.
– Is ‘culture’ the problem?
– Is leadership the problem?
• These narratives can help us to identify points of instability and
dissatisfaction within organisations.
• These multiple and competing narratives can help guide our
decisions and provide organisational members with a better sense
of involvement in management processes.
Symbols of control? Power rather
than product?
Cult or culture?
OT to the rescue?
First Day on the Job as Department
Manager
How should I choose to think about:
– Organisational culture?
– Senior management’s position?
– The department?
– My role in the department?
– The way my perspective of the ‘problem’ may
influence my management decisions?