Chapter 9: Culture

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Chapter 9 Culture
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Chapter aims

• Identify the origins of OBs interest in culture
• Outline the mainstream perspective and assess its
  credibility
• Outline the critical perspective and how it
  differs from the mainstream

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Culture An overview

• Mainstream
• Something an organization has
• Can be shaped by management
• Promotes a one-best culture or matching culture
  type with context
• The dominant view
• Top-down approach

• Critical
• Something an organization is
• Emerges organically
• Promotes idea of subcultures
• Sceptical about the management of culture

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Interest in organizational culture

• Emerges in late 1970s as a response to challenges
  facing Western management
• General decline in religious belief
• Search for identity in response to alienation
• Expansion of highly technical work and the growth
  of service industries
• Demand for customer orientation and employee
  autonomy
• Limitations of a mechanical, Theory X approach
  to managing people
• Renewed focus on the soft human side of
  organizing
• Innovative production methods
• Required increasing flexibility and greater
  employee commitment
• The Japanese miracle
• Emergence of Japan as an economic power post-WWII

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Aspects of organizational culture

• Mission and goals
• Psychological contract
• Authority and power relations
• Qualities desired/not desired
• Communication and interaction patterns
• Rewards and punishments
• Ways of dealing with the outside world

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Scheins 3 levels of culture
Artefacts
Visible organizational structures (hard to
decipher). E.g. office layout, rituals, dress
codes, shared language
Espoused values
Strategies, goals, philosophies (espoused
justifications). Accessed through observation,
asking questions
Unconscious, taken for granted beliefs,
perceptions, thoughts and feelings. Ultimate
source of values and action i.e. essence of
culture
Basic assumptions
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Mainstream perspective

• Culture as something an organization has
• Culture understood to be
• A variable
• Integrating and stabilizing
• Created at the top (i.e. cultural engineering)
• Culture as a management lever to ensure
  employee efforts directed towards organizational
  goals

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Is there a one-best way?

• An area of disagreement within the mainstream
• one best culture view provides a formula for
  organizational success
• E.g. Peters Waterman (1982)
• horses for courses view suggests the best type
  of culture depends on the context
• E.g. Deal Kennedy (1988)
• Both views assume a connection between culture
  and organizational performance

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Peters Waterman (1982) In Search of Excellence

• Excellent cultures share
• A bias for action
• Close to the customer
• Autonomy and entrepreneurship
• Productivity through people
• Hands-on, value driven
• Stick to the knitting
• Simple form, lean staff
• Simultaneous loose-tight properties

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Handys culture types
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Mainstream Limitations

• Limitations
• strong cultures might not be good cultures
• Might encourage complacency, lack of creativity,
  inflexibility and groupthink
• Success of culture change programmes in producing
  long-term success
• Little rigorous research
• Over-emphasis on one factor (i.e. culture) as the
  key to organizational success

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Critical perspective

• Culture as something an organization is
• More anthropological than the mainstream view
• Focus on understanding rather than offering
  prescriptions for change
• Culture a metaphor rather than a variable
• Everything in organizations is cultural in some
  way
• Culture a jointly produced system of
  intersubjectivity
• Examines how shared assumptions emerge and are
  transmitted
• Culture not a top-down process
• Everyone participates in its construction
• Culture a coping mechanism rather than a
  management tool

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On subcultures

• Mainstream thinking acknowledges sub-cultures
  exist, but focuses on how this differentiation
  can be overcome
• Critical thinking takes this differentiation
  further
• Subcultures inevitable, normal and a site of
  struggle
• Subcultures extend beyond organizational
  boundaries (e.g. ethnic, religious)
• Individuals can belong to multiple sub-cultures
• Complexifies the idea of managing an
  organizational culture
• Argues mainstream is naïve in this respect

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Reactions to top-down culture change

• Golden (1998) identifies four possible reactions
• Unequivocal adherence complete support
• Strained adherence support despite reservations
• Secret non-adherence outward compliance but
  rejection of values
• Open non-adherence open resistance

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Important empirical studies

• Collinson (1988)
• Study of truck-making factory
• Argues that culture allowed male employees to
  deal with the demands of the job
• Humour did not produce a supportive community or
  any basis for collective resistance

• Ackroyd and Crowdy (1990)
• Study of abattoir
• A highly competitive and macho culture developed
• E.g. throwing entrails at co-workers
• This culture suited management because reduced
  need for direct supervision

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Critical perspective Agreements and disagreements

• Agreement that
• Culture is a metaphor
• Is jointly produced by all organization members
• Is multiple and fragmented
• Is very difficult to manage
• But disagree on extent to which managers can
  impose a culture on employees
• Some equate culture with brainwashing. E.g.
  Willmott (1993)
• Others suggest employees will resist management
  attempts to manipulate them