MGT5313 Chap.2 Organizational Culture and Its Components
Organizational Culture and Its Components
Culture is a difference, not an atmosphere
Culture is defined as the shared meanings its members hold, which set one organization apart from the next, and the distinguishing clause is the working part. A description of a firm that would fit any firm in its sector has not described its culture.
Seven primary characteristics are used to capture the essence of one: innovation and risk taking, attention to detail, outcome orientation, people orientation, team orientation, aggressiveness and stability.
Each is a position rather than a label, which is why two firms can both be called innovative and behave nothing alike.
Why culture is treated as a performance variable
Staff build one overall impression of the place out of things like how much risk it tolerates, how far it works through teams and how hard it drives at results.
That perception becomes the organization's culture or personality, and favourable or unfavourable perceptions then affect performance and satisfaction, with the effect greater for stronger cultures. Culture is therefore an intervening variable and strength is the amplifier. Two instruments are named for measuring it.
An engagement survey asks whether staff have genuinely bought into the firm and its values and will spend effort beyond the minimum; the material reports that an engaged employee puts in effort beyond the minimum at four times the rate of a disengaged one, with thirteen per cent of employees across one hundred and forty two countries counted as engaged.
A climate survey is narrower, indicating the views and sentiments of the people in one leader's own teams and functions.
The components, and which ones are merely emitted
Values are the deep beliefs and internal yardsticks used to settle what counts as right, as wrong, as important or as worth wanting, and the harder they are held the further they steer behaviour.
Norms are the unwritten rules that tell people how to behave, and they are never expressed in writing. Artefacts are the parts of a workplace that can be seen, heard or felt, from the working environment to the tone of emails and the welcome given to visitors. Ceremonial rites split into rites of integration, which build common bonds, and rites of enhancement, which publicly recognise contribution.
Stories about organizational superstars reveal which behaviours are actually valued. Language and symbols carry the rest: how people dress and address each other, and what the size and location of an office signals about hierarchy and status.
The declared components are the weakest evidence and the emitted ones are the strongest, which is why a case analysis that quotes a values page and stops has gathered the least informative material available.
Two typologies that share two cells
One classification sorts cultures by where influence sits: a power culture concentrates power among a few with few rules and a competitive political atmosphere, a role culture runs on procedures with power attached to positions, a task culture bases influence on expert power and values teamwork, and a person culture exists to serve the individuals in it.
A second classification keeps power and role and then changes the question, adding an achievement culture that stresses personal motivation and values action, excitement and impact, and a support culture where people contribute out of commitment and solidarity. The second pair is about what members respond to rather than about who holds influence, so the two lists cannot be merged.
Cutting across both is the distinction between a dominant culture, expressing the core values a majority share, and subcultures developing around the common problems of a department or location.
Where a culture comes from, and what a recommendation may therefore say
Four interacting factors produce a culture: the characteristics of the people, particularly the founder and top managers; organizational ethics; structure, where tall and centralised arrangements reward caution and obedience while flat and decentralised ones reward creativity and risk; and the property rights system, the rights the organization gives members to receive and use its resources.
The material is also explicit that no culture is better in the abstract, only better or worse fitted to what this organization needs and to the circumstances it is in. That sentence disciplines every recommendation you will write: show the mismatch in the firm's own circumstances first, and only then propose the change.
What this chapter covers
- 01
The seven primary characteristics, read as positions rather than labels
- 02
Culture as an intervening variable, with strength as the amplifier
- 03
Engagement surveys against climate surveys
- 04
Values, norms and artefacts: what is declared and what is emitted
- 05
Rites, stories, language and symbols as carriers of the same message
- 06
Strong against weak, and dominant against sub
- 07
Two published typologies, and the two cells where they part
- 08
The four factors that produce a culture, and appropriateness as the test
Read a culture from the evidence it emits
- 3Rank the four pieces of evidence by weight, and justify the ranking.
- 3Read the reward system and the office geography as cultural components.
- 3Apply the strength test and state the verdict.
Key terms
- Norms
- Unwritten rules giving informal guidance on conduct, reaching what people say, what they believe and what they wear. The course material stresses that they are never expressed in writing.
- Artefacts
- The parts of a workplace that can be seen, heard or felt, including the working environment, the tone of written communication and the welcome given to visitors.
- Rites Of Integration
- Shared events such as announcements of success, parties and staff gatherings that build and reinforce common bonds between members.
- Rites Of Enhancement
- Events such as awards dinners and public recognition that reward contributions and make visible which behaviours the organization values.
- Mechanistic Structure
- A tall, highly centralised and standardised arrangement in which people have relatively little personal autonomy and caution, obedience and respect for tradition are the rewarded behaviours.
- Organic Structure
- A flat, decentralised arrangement relying on mutual adjustment, in which members hold wider latitude over what they do, and creativity and risk taking are the rewarded behaviours.
- Strong Culture
- A culture whose core values are held with conviction and shared right across the workforce, so that members give one another's account of what the firm is for.
Organizational Culture and Its Components FAQ
Can a company have more than one culture at the same time?
Yes, and most large ones do. The dominant culture carries the values most members hold in common, while a subculture grows up wherever one department or site meets its own recurring problems.
Finding that head office and the regions describe the firm differently is therefore a normal structural fact rather than evidence of failure, and the useful question is whether the subcultures work against the dominant one or merely alongside it.
Is a strong culture always better?
Not according to the course material, which states that no culture is better than another in the abstract, only more or less appropriate to the organization's needs and circumstances. Strength amplifies whatever is there, so it makes an appropriate culture more valuable and an inappropriate one harder to change. The instruction that follows is to reinforce a culture that fits and attempt to change one that does not.
Which evidence should I use when analysing a company I cannot get inside?
Use the emitted components rather than the declared ones. Office arrangements, forms of address, what the recognition communications celebrate, what the recruitment material asks for and how the reward system is described are all observable from outside and all carry cultural information. A values page tells you only what the organization chose to publish, which is why it is the weakest item in the set.
Does exporting a successful culture to another country usually work?
The course material warns that going global can put even a strong and positive culture at risk, since such a culture usually grew out of the home country's own values, and installing one culture across borders can set employees of historically rival nations against one another.
The prescription is to build corporate values that are unique and separate from identifiable country norms, and to check the cultural relevance of existing norms before introducing any new plan overseas.
Assessment move
Take the seven characteristics and score your group project organization on each one, writing a single sentence of evidence beside every score. Where you cannot find evidence, that gap is your first research task rather than a reason to guess. Doing this before the analysis section is drafted usually reveals that two or three characteristics carry the whole story, and those are the ones the presentation should be built on.
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