What is this thing called organisational culture?
Conversations often refer to different organisations having different
cultures. For the average person - "culture" may mean that
they perceive the organisation they are involved with to be
- pushy, harsh and authoritarian
- very political with traps and pitfalls for people to fall into if they are not nimble and able to wheeler-deal
and hold their own in a brawl
- rule and ritual bound
- cold and separated
- brisk, dynamic, opportunitic
- exploitative, all take and no give
- caring and genuinely interested in people as people
People classify what they see as the characteristics of organisations. We construe
and organisation culture. It is socially defined and experienced. The
experience of the things we feel are displayed by the "culture and its
practices" affect how we behave and respond
to the organisations we work in.
Culture Control and Engineering
Managers seek to "change" the culture of the organisation. What
they
therefore try to do is shape the way that people behave, feel, contribute,
interact, perform as employees of the organisation. This is usually called leadership!
They initiate the debates, set the imperatives and priorities. If the managers
want to pursue quality improvement then meetings will be held, training will be
done, banners will be waved - new imperatives are brought
in to the business to be integrated by way of activities, expectations, values
and sanctions into the culture of the business. This is business - the business
must succeed in co-ordinated, highly charged ways.
New policies, methods and roles are
introduced to shape behaviours, encourage, promote and require - to push
certain expectations of performance in the business and thus to control.
Spoken of in other ways, culture in organisational terms is broadly
the social/behavioural manifestation and experiencing of
a whole range of issues such as :
- the way work is organised and experienced
- how authority exercised and distributed
- how people are and feel rewarded, organised and controlled
- the values and work orientation of staff
- the degree of formalisation, standardisation and control through systems
there is/should be
- the value placed on planning, analysis, logic, fairness etc
- how much initiative, risk-taking, scope for individuality and expression is given
- rules and expectations about such things as informality in
interpersonal relations, dress, personal eccentricity etc
- differential status
- emphasiss given to rules, procedures, specifications of performance and results,
team or individual working
Organisational Culture and Working Life
We are born into a culture, we take up employment in a culture.
We might therefore argue that the culture of an organisation
affects the type of people employed, their career
aspirations, their educational backgrounds, their status
in society. The culture of the organisation may embrace them. It may
reject them.
Visibility
Organisational culture may be visible
- in the type of buildings, offices, shops of the organisation.
- in the image projected in publicity and public relations in general.
Think for example
of the differences between a local authority, a computer
manufacturer, and a merchant bank.
An organisation's culture may be imperceptable, taken
for granted, assumed, a status quo that we live and participate in
but do not question. Elements of the culture may be questioned where
individual or group expectations do not correspond to
the behaviours associated with the prevailing values of those who uphold
"the culture".
An organisation may display elements of several "cultures"
which may contradict each other, which may compete. We can
even consider the characteristics of an anti-organisational or
countervailing culture.
Classifying/Modelling Organisation Culture
To understand organisation cultures we can begin by describing
types of organisation such as democractic, laissez-faire, participative etc.
Such descriptions in a sense become representative "models"
of organisations (abstrations). The model defines our assessment of elements,
relationships, determinants and likely effects. Our model may enable us to
predict events so that we act to steer our own behaviour and the behvaiour of others.
Defining "models or frameworks" helps us to
understand what the phenomena is, discuss it with others and
identify what we might do to translate the model or parts of it into reality.
Various models indicative of organisation culture have been suggested.
Important ones include
- Rensis Likert
autocratic, benevolent autocractic, consusltative and participative
systems of organsiation
- Burns and Stalker
mechanistic and organismic organisations
- Henry Mintzberg
Simple Structure, Machine Bureaucracy, Divisionalized,
Professional Bureaucracy, the Adhocracy
- Roger Harrison
power, role, task and personal cultures of organisations
- Pedler et al
the Learning Organisation
A Few References
- Handy C, Understanding Organisations, Penguin
- Mintzberg H, The Structuring of Organisations, Addision Wesley
- Reddin W, Managerial Effectiveness, McGraw Hill
- Likert R, The Professional Manager, Wiley
- Mintzberg H, Lampel J, Quinn J, Ghoshal S, 2003, The Strategy Process Concepts, Contexts and Cases, Prentice Hall, I988.
- Buchanan D and Huczynski A, Organisational Behaviour, Prentice Hall
© 2003 Developed and maintained by Chris Jarvis