3
WHAT ARE THE ELEMENTS AND DIMENSIONS OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE?
The Popular View: Inventories and Typologies
When you think about culture, chances are you identify some aspect of how the people in your organization relate to each other and how they do their jobs—“the way we do things around here.” The most common view is that culture is about human relations in the organization. Culture is often confused with “climate,” how the organization feels, what the employee morale is, how well people are getting along. There is a strong temptation to look for broad categories such as “command and control” or “autocratic versus democratic.” Culture typologies built on these popular views talk about levels of “sociability” and “solidarity” or about “internal versus external focus” and “flexibility versus stability and control.”1 Almost all of these typologies and the questionnaires designed to measure the underlying dimensions are based on some aspect of the human relations inside the organization or in connection with the environment. When culture change is proposed it is almost always in relation to more teamwork, employee involvement, reducing the layers of supervision in the organization, creating lateral communication, building loyalty and commitment in the organization, empowering employees, and becoming more customer oriented. Most questionnaires that purport to assess culture deal with these same issues.
These views of culture are correct but dangerously narrow. Cultural assumptions in organizations do grow around how people in the organization relate to each other, but that is only a fraction of what culture covers. Culture-change programs that focus narrowly on how employees currently perceive their organization versus how they would like the organization to be are unlikely to work because they ignore other elements of culture that are more deeply embedded and may not even be noticed.
For example, a large insurance company hired a new CEO who concluded that among the company’s main problems was a lack of innovation. He launched multiple programs to increase innovation, all of which failed. Why? A number of employee focus groups were launched to analyze the problem. In reviewing the company’s history it was revealed that past success was based on a tightly structured system of figuring out the best solution to any given problem, documenting the solution, putting all of the solutions into large manuals organized by every conceivable kind of problem that could arise, and systematically rewarding employees for using the rules written out in the manuals.
Over the years, employees had learned that the road to success was to apply the rules. The number of manuals grew to cover every new situation that arose. Employees who did not like to work in this kind of rule-bound, structured environment were encouraged to leave the organization, leading to a workforce that was comfortable in the structured environment. Previous CEOs had glorified this system of working, and indeed it had been highly successful in building the company. It came to be taken for granted that the best way to work was to follow the rules in the manuals.
The new CEO saw that the company was in a changing environment and realized that many of the new situations the company would face could not be preprogrammed. Employees would have to learn to think for themselves as they faced a turbulent environment. He launched various campaigns to reward innovation (suggestion boxes, prizes for new ideas) yet received little response. He did not realize that the entire organization was built on the assumption that the correct way to do things was to follow the rules, and that over the years this assumption had become deeply embedded in all the layers of management and employees because it was successful. It was in the very fabric of how the organization operated, built into how the company recruited, rewarded, and promoted people. For this organization to change its way of working would require a complete assessment of all aspects of its culture. Ironically, if this CEO became aware of these deep cultural elements, perhaps he could have succeeded by imposing a new rule. Every month every department had to invent three new ways of doing things and write up a manual to that effect!!!
If a cultural assessment is to be done, what content areas would such an assessment have to cover If we look back at the culture diagrams of DEC, we see that many of the tacit assumptions are about people relationships, but what would be missed if we had not looked more deeply into the DEC culture would be the assumption that truth can only be derived by full and open debate and that the mission of the organization was innovation based on good creative engineering. The human relations assumptions were derivative from the assumptions about the mission of the organization and how to best accomplish it.
To give you a more realistic view of what culture covers, look at Exhibit 3.1. It outlines the areas in which cultural assumptions make a difference. The first thing to notice is that cultural assumptions involve not only the internal workings of the organization but, more important, how the organization views itself in relation to its various environments.
Culture Content, Part One: Surviving in the External Environment
Mission, Strategy, Goals
To survive and grow, every organization must develop viable assumptions about what to do and how to do it. For an organization to succeed in the sense of accomplishing its mission, surviving, and growing, it must fulfill what its various environments demand and afford. Most organizations evolve assumptions about their basic mission and identity, about their strategic intent, financial policies, fundamental way of organizing themselves and their work, way of measuring themselves, and means for correcting themselves when they are perceived to be off target.
When the organization was first created, its founders and early leaders had a strong sense of mission and identity—what they were trying to be, what product or market they were trying to develop, who they were and what justified them. To raise money, they had to develop a credible story around these questions, and the first set of employees needed to buy into and believe the story, even if they knew initially that it was a risk and might not work out. But if it did work out and the organization succeeded, the founders and the employees would begin to form shared assumptions around those initial beliefs—and over time come to take them for granted. The deep sense of mission and identity may become so taken for granted that it surfaces only if some event violates it and thereby brings it to consciousness.
An example from the Swiss company Ciba-Geigy illustrates the point. In the mid-1970s, C-G consisted of four major product divisions (dyestuffs, industrial chemicals, agricultural chemicals, and pharmaceuticals) and many country units. Historically the company traced its roots to the dyestuffs business and the important discoveries made in the R&D labs that led to new products in the agricultural and pharmaceutical domains. The company recognized that its strength was in R&D and that it had remained profitable largely because of patent protection. Leadership recognized that, as patents expired and competition in each market grew, C-G needed to improve marketing and reduce costs.
Thus far, this story may seem like fairly traditional evolution; so where does culture come in? To improve marketing skills, C-G empowered its U.S. subsidiary to purchase a consumer goods company because organizations of that kind learn how to do sophisticated marketing. They purchased Airwick, a maker of air fresheners, carpet cleaners, and other products to remove unpleasant odors. For a number of years, Airwick struggled along but gradually became profitable, not only in the United States but in various European countries where it developed subsidiaries.
At that time, I was working with the C-G corporate executive committee in running an annual meeting of its top fifty functional, divisional, and country managers. In one of these meetings, the president of the U.S. subsidiary was reporting on the progress of Airwick and showing videotape of a particularly successful advertising campaign that introduced a new product, Carpet Fresh. The ads showed a housewife sprinkling Carpet Fresh powder on her rugs and a minute or so later vacuuming it up, to illustrate how easy the product was to use.
I was sitting next to a member of the executive committee, a man who had developed several of C-G’s major chemical products and who saw himself as an important strategist in the company. Watching the videotape, he began to squirm in his seat, showed signs of great tension, and finally leaned over to me and said in a loud whisper, “You know, Schein, those aren’t even products.”
In that moment, I glimpsed his image of what C-G was all about. He saw it as a company producing “important products” that combated starvation (industrial pesticides enabled third-world countries to grow crops) and saved lives (pharmaceutical products were geared to curing major diseases). In that context, and with that sense of mission, how could one possibly view an air or carpet freshener as worthy of being called a “product”? How could one possibly want to associate with such a trivial matter? This man’s self-image was violated by C-G’s association with Airwick—never mind that the whole idea was to learn something about marketing and that Airwick was beginning to show good financial results. Airwick just did not fit.
Some months later, I learned of another way in which this aspect of the corporate culture impacted their daily functioning. The European division of Airwick was based in Paris, and that office hired a very talented woman to be chief financial officer. They reported with pride that they were beginning to break the gender barrier in their promotional policies, and she was a prime example. However, she left some months later and related the following incident. In organizing Airwick’s European operation, she needed a more efficient and speedier accounting system than what C-G was using. She went to the corporate head of accounting in the Basel headquarters and requested permission and funds to institute the new system, only to be told, “Mrs. Smith, I think you will find that our accounting system has been quite adequate to the task for one hundred years or so, and it should certainly be adequate, therefore, to your tasks.” Needless to say, she left and Airwick managers were forced to bootleg systems in secrecy that would meet their needs.
The cultural moral of this story is that an acquisition strategy has to fit the existing culture. Even though the purpose of the acquisition was to learn marketing from a consumer-goods company, this particular set of products was giving C-G cultural indigestion. C-G’s sense of mission and self-image were violated by these “non-products,” even though Airwick was beginning to show profit in many countries. To deal with their discomfort, the executive committee appointed a senior Swiss manager to evaluate the future of Airwick over a period of several years and recommend what C-G should do with it. From a cultural perspective, it was obvious that he would eventually recommend that they sell Airwick—which is what they did. At the same time they reaffirmed their self-image of only making acquisitions of companies that were based on sophisticated technology. At subsequent annual meetings, it was stated explicitly that C-G should only buy companies with a strong technical base. Culture was driving the acquisition strategy.
C-G managers may or may not have recognized that they were dealing with culture, and that they held deeply embedded assumptions about who they were, what kinds of things qualified as products, and what acquisition strategy was OK or not OK. We tend to think that we can separate strategy from culture, but we fail to notice that in most organizations strategic thinking is deeply colored by tacit assumptions about who they are and what their mission is.
Over its history, any organization learns a great deal about what kinds of strategies work and what ones do not. Such strategies are about types of products and services, types of markets, level of quality desired, level of price that the customer base will accept, and so on. These points are reflected in the first category in Exhibit 3.1: the basic mission of the organization, its strategic intent, and the goals derived from the mission and strategy. This category of culture is so central that it warrants another example to illustrate how these culture dynamics work.
Early in the history of Digital Equipment (DEC), the mission was to bring efficient interactive computing to the scientifically minded user, offer distributed computing power to organizations, and show the world the power of a midsized computer. Its product strategy, concept of who the customer was, pricing, and decisions about level of quality all were driven during the company’s high-growth phase by these strategic goals. The degree to which they came to be taken for granted and thus part of the culture at DEC could be measured by the difficulty the company had in designing a product to compete with IBM’s personal computer. At some level, DEC engineers did not really respect the “dumb user” for whom a low-cost, user-friendly PC would have to be designed, inasmuch as all of their past success had been with sophisticated users who were perfectly willing to do some of their own programming. The high technical standards and quality of DEC products also made them more elegant than they needed to be and more expensive, hence not very competitive in the new PC market.
Several cultural forces conspired to make the DEC entry into the PC world a basic failure. First was the deep assumption that the engineers basically did not care much about the dumb user. Second, smart people should be empowered to do the right thing. Three engineering managers with very strong ideas about the PC proposed potential products, named the DECmate, the Pro, and the Rainbow. At this point in its history, DEC was already fairly large and differentiated, and the engineering managers all had their own power bases and strong convictions that their products would win in the marketplace. They were themselves products of the DEC culture.
A third cultural assumption that came into play was that, if one could not make a clear internal decision, “Let the marketplace decide.” A tradition had grown up in the company that having internally competing groups was healthy; the marketplace would reveal which was the best product. DEC had been successful with this internal-competition approach and hence did not question it. It was OK to have three competing PC projects.
But the cultural assumption that each manager and employee was obliged to “do the right thing” led to another problem. Ken Olsen, the founder, and other managers believed that the three proposed products were over-engineered, too elegant, and too expensive. Yet no one, not even Olsen, could convince the engineering managers to scale down their products. In the DEC culture, one could not order the three groups to do things differently; one could only try to convince them. In the end, all three products failed competitively, even though each claimed to be an excellent PC. The story highlights how a strategic failure in the product-development arena can only be understood in the context of culture.
Questions for the Reader
Ask yourself and others in your organization these questions:
• What is the fundamental mission of your organization? What is its reason for being? What justifies its existence in the larger scheme of things?
• How do your organization’s strategy and the goals derived from it fit that mission?
• Where did this strategy and set of goals come from? Is the strategy completely based on formal reasoning and logic, or is it partly a product of the beliefs and biases of the organization’s founders and leaders?
Means: Structure, Systems, and Processes
How an organization decides to implement its strategy and goals is the next level of culture content. The formal organizational structure in one company may be very tall, steep, and multilayered; if they succeed with this structure, they come to believe that it is the correct way to organize. In another organization, the founder creates a flat structure with many overlapping committees and task forces; here too, if they succeed they believe just as strongly that theirs is the correct way to organize. The degree to which the structure is adapted to the task to be performed and the nature of the environment in which the organization operates creates the shared tacit assumptions about how to organize. Glib labeling of an organization as a command-and-control type or a flat-network type reflects some elements of this category, but note that such labels describe only one small aspect of the corporate culture—and often a very irrelevant aspect.
The insurance company CEO in the earlier example in this chapter did not realize that the compulsive adherence to rules was based on evolving ways of working that fitted the early strategy of the company and was, therefore, thoroughly imbedded. Simply calling for innovation would not overcome employee desire to stick to routines that had worked very well in the past.
The complexity of cultural analysis is also revealed in this category in that an organization can have a shared mission and strategic intent, yet units may organize themselves differently in their efforts to achieve it. Subcultures are thus created within the organization’s overall culture. As organizations grow and differentiate themselves into functional, product, market, and geographically based units, they also develop subcultures around each of these bases. Such subcultures may have learned to be very different from each other because the parts of the organization have to succeed in different kinds of environments.
For example, in the 1960s a large aerospace company, Northrop, prided itself on its egalitarian structure; there were few levels and few rules throughout its production units. During a workshop to analyze their culture, a group of senior managers could not figure out why Northrop’s headquarters organization in Los Angeles seemed to violate this culture by being multilayered, very rigid, and very status conscious. There were three levels of dining rooms, all kinds of rules about dress and demeanor, rigid adherence to hours of work, and so on. They finally realized that the subculture of the headquarters organization had developed this way because its primary customer was the Pentagon. The military visitors to the company were used to a system in which status, dress codes, rank, privileges, and so on were all very well defined.
In their factories, a completely different set of assumptions grew up around the complex technology, which required a high degree of teamwork and mutual trust among employees. The nature of the work defined the rules and norms in terms of quality of work and getting the job done. There were no time clocks; hours were determined by the nature of the task; the selection and promotion system encouraged hiring of relatives because it was easier to develop trusting relationships in a family atmosphere; and status was determined by knowledge and skill level, not by formal title. Once the group recognized that the tasks of factory and headquarters differed, they realized that it was appropriate for these units to develop distinct subcultures.
Recall from Chapter One how Procter & Gamble restructured the manufacturing division into a set of autonomously self-managed plants to achieve the shared strategic intent of becoming a low-cost producer while maintaining high quality. In their marketing, sales, and financial divisions, no such structures emerged, showing that different means of accomplishing a shared strategy can coexist. Similarly, within DEC’s very egalitarian environment, there existed a service organization that was highly structured, authoritarian, and disciplined because in the service environment only such a structure could deliver efficiently what the customers required.
Every organization that succeeds develops a way of structuring work; defining the production and marketing processes; and creating the kinds of information, reward, and control systems it needs to operate effectively. As these systems continue to work, they are taken for granted as the way to do things, and an employee who moves from one unit to another often finds it difficult to learn how to work in the new environment. It is for this reason that, once organizations have strong cultures, they prefer to promote from within. It is often too difficult to train an outsider in “how things are done around here.” On the other hand, if the way things are done becomes dysfunctional in a changing environment, it is these elements of the culture that are often the hardest to change because people have been hired, been trained, and become habituated to this way of doing things. As we will see, this issue became critical in the ultimate economic demise of DEC.
Questions for the Reader
Ask yourself and others:
• How did your own organization develop its approach to meeting goals?
• How and why did it develop the kind of structure that it has? Do the formal structure and the design of how work gets done largely reflect the beliefs of the founders and leaders of the organization?
• To what extent are the means used in the functional and geographic divisions the same (or different)?
• Is there evidence that your organization has strong subcultures within it? What are they based on?
Measurement: Error-Detection and Correction Systems
The third cultural issue seen in Exhibit 3.1 concerns how the organization measures itself, detects errors, and corrects them. Organizations evolve different mechanisms for deciphering the environment: financial indicators, frequent debriefing of the sales force to determine what is going on “out there,” formal marketing surveys, creating special departments whose job it is to find out what is going on and bring the information into the organization, rates of employee turnover, morale and other kinds of surveys, and so on. The CEO, the sales force, the purchasing department, the R&D unit, the personnel function, and the marketing department all have windows to the environment, but every company develops its own ways of using them and, if successful, comes to believe that theirs are the correct ways.
For most business organizations, financial performance is the primary error-detecting mechanism because of its seeming objectivity, but cultural assumptions dominate even what kind of information is gathered and how it is interpreted. For example, some companies go almost exclusively by the stock price as the indicator of how they are doing. Others look at debt-to-equity ratios, cash flow, or market share. In each case, cultural assumptions arise from the indicators that work best. If the organization is functionally organized, it may also develop a subculture around the finance function, and actual conflicts may develop between finance, production, engineering, and marketing over which indicators to use in assessing company performance.
What is defined as a significant variance or an error itself varies from company to company and becomes embedded in cultural assumptions. One story about Levi Strauss has it that they were able to make major changes by declaring a crisis whenever the profitability index dropped by 0.5 percent. What is culturally significant in this story is not that they responded to such a small variance but that employees accepted management’s definition that this was indeed a crisis.
Error correction, like error detection, reflects the history of the company and the personalities of its founders. Many organizations develop what has come to be labeled a “blaming culture.” Managers tend to be trained to think in terms of simple cause-and-effect; they need to feel in control, and the broader managerial culture makes a sacred cow out of individual accountability. Given this way of thinking, if things go wrong the obvious response is to find out who is to blame, who is responsible, who is accountable.
But companies differ markedly in how they respond to what they find out. In some organizations, once blamed, a person is instantly dismissed. In other organizations, particularly those having grown around strong paternalistic and lifetime-employment values, this person may not even be told that he or she has been blamed but is simply taken off the fast-track career ladder, given less-important assignments, and in other ways punished by having career opportunities permanently limited.
A third pattern that was evident in DEC was to be “put into the penalty box.” Since everyone belonged to the family, no one could lose membership (a job), but you could lose your assignment on a project and be forced to find another assignment on your own. If you found another job in the company and did well in it, you were celebrated as a case of successful “rehabilitation.” Underlying this system was an important assumption about people: if someone fails, it is because of a mismatch between the person and the job; the person is always OK, but the person-job match may not be. This assumption made it clear how much people were valued, but it also made it clear that everyone had a great responsibility to manage his or her own career and to speak up if there was a mismatch.
A fourth system of error correction used by many organizations attempts to avoid personal blame, instead seeking the root or systemic cause of the failure. The U.S. Army’s program of “after action reviews,” project postmortems, and other kinds of reviews attempts to build more learning into the process instead of blame. Note, though, that such systemic reviews do not work if the culture is strongly individualistic and competitive because people will not open up negative information about themselves and each other. If the organization develops a blaming culture, employees disassociate themselves from a failed project as quickly as possible and are reluctant to engage in a postmortem because it might reveal that they are in some way to blame. Only if enough trust and teamwork are built up over time, and only if that way of working succeeds, does systemic error analysis and correction work and become acceptable.
A current example illustrating the complexity of measurement is the issue of safety—protecting both the public and employees in industries that are hazardous. The Alpha Power Company that supplies power to a large metropolitan area is strategically dedicated to providing reliable service safely. Because of the inherent danger in managing this technology, not only do employees sometimes get hurt severely, but the public is also at risk from explosions, stray voltage, and other hazards deriving from the delivery of this service. The measurement of reliability (keeping the power on) competes with the measurement of number of injuries to employees or the public (shutting down power temporarily when a hazard has been discovered). Cultural norms gradually develop around levels of “acceptable risk,” priorities of what to maintain when, how much money to spend on aging equipment, and what target numbers to shoot for on rates of employee injuries. The culture begins to reflect systems of how to make compromises, how to set priorities, and how to keep searching for even better measures of how the safety programs are doing.
Questions for the Reader
Ask yourself and others:
• What are the error-detection systems in your organization? How do you discover that you are not meeting goals and targets?
• What do you do about it if you discover that some important goals are not being met?
• Are there variations among parts of the organization in how they measure themselves and what they do about the results? Can you see evidence in such variation of important subculture differences?
I have tried to show in these last few pages that culture is heavily implicated in the basic mission, strategy, means, measurement, and remedial systems of the organization. Culture is not just about people and how we manage them. It is not just about teamwork or reward systems. Cultural assumptions develop over time regarding the core fabric of the organization and its basic mission and strategy. If you fail to take these parts of the culture into account when trying to change other parts of the culture, you will discover that the other parts do not respond as you hope they will.
Culture Content, Part Two: Integrating the Human Organization
The popularized view of culture focuses on the relationships among the people in the organization, the incentive and reward systems, and the degree of teamwork, superior-subordinate relationships, communication, and all the other processes that make the workplace more or less productive and pleasant. The cultural assumptions that grow up around these areas are, of course, critical. But they interact with the externally oriented assumptions we have reviewed (and listed in the first part of Exhibit 3.1) and thus cannot be treated in isolation.
Common Language and Concepts
The most obvious manifestations of culture are common language and common ways of thinking. We see this most clearly at the national level, when we travel and find out how difficult it is to get along in other countries if we do not know the language or how the locals think. On a trip to southern France many years ago, I found myself in a small rural post office in a line waiting to buy some stamps. Just as it was my turn, a man came into the post office and started to talk to the clerk, interrupting my hesitant French request. To my surprise, the clerk turned her attention to the man and dealt with his issue for several minutes before returning to my request. When I told this story later to my French friends, they laughed and said: “You know, Ed, the situation is even worse than you imagine. The clerk was going by the cultural principle that she will deal with whoever’s agenda she considers most important. By your letting the intruder capture her attention, you were displaying to the entire post office your low sense of self-esteem.” Evidently what I should have done was to loudly and firmly recapture the clerk’s attention instead of standing by in silent resentment.
The organizational equivalent of such events occurs when new employees try to figure out how to dress, how to talk to their bosses, how to behave in group meetings, how to decipher all the jargon and acronyms that other employees throw around, how assertive to be, how late to stay at work, and so on. One reason it takes time before one can become productive in a new organization is because so many of the norms, ways of working, and ways of thinking are unique to that organization and have to be learned by trial and error.
For example, in DEC “real work” was defined as debating things out with others and getting buy-in, whereas in Ciba-Geigy real work meant thinking things out by oneself. At one point in DEC history, management decided they needed to speed up the process of cultural learning, so they launched a series of what they called “boot camps” for new employees in which newcomers and old-timers were taken off-site to spend several days with a facilitator. The boot camp provided opportunities for the old-timers to talk about the DEC culture and for newcomers to ask questions about all the things puzzling them in their new work environment.
Questions for the Reader
Ask yourself and others:
• Does your organization use special jargon or acronyms that you take for granted but that an outsider finds strange and undecipherable? What are some examples?
• What do your friends notice about your language and way of thinking that they associate with membership in your organization?
• If you have worked for more than one organization, what are the differences among them in how people talk and think?
Group Boundaries: Who Is In and Who Is Out?
Every organization develops ways of identifying degrees of membership, ranging from uniforms and badges to more subtle indicators such as who gets what parking slots, stock options, and other perquisites. As newcomers learn the language and ways of thinking, they find they are more often included in organizational events. An important stage of acceptance is when the newcomer is trusted enough to be told “secrets,” information about what is really going on, who is in and who is out, what the company is really working on, details about the private lives of senior executives, and so on. With such membership comes the obligation to be more loyal, not to reveal those secrets to outsiders, to work harder, and to invest more of oneself in the organization. The shared tacit assumptions about membership and its obligations make up a significant portion of what we think of as the culture of an organization. But once again, remember: it is only one portion of the culture.
Questions for the Reader
Ask yourself and others:
• What are the badges of membership in your organization? Are there uniforms that signify membership?
• Do you use special symbols or privileges to symbolize degrees of membership?
• Do you think about who is an insider, who is an outsider, and what this means in terms of your relationship to those people?
• Can you recall what it was like to enter your current organization?
• Have you brought anyone into your organization? How did you manage the process?
How Relationships, Rank, and Authority Are Defined
Organizations differ in the assumptions they make about authority relationships and the degree of intimacy that is considered appropriate among members. Some organizations are aggressively egalitarian and minimize the psychological distance between bosses and subordinates. A hierarchy may exist, but subordinates are encouraged to use first names with their bosses, go around levels when it seems appropriate, and do the right thing even if it means insubordination (as was the case in DEC). In other organizations, the hierarchy is formally observed, relationships across levels are very formal, and it is inconceivable to go around levels or challenge the boss (as was the case in Ciba-Geigy). Both companies thought of themselves as “families,” but for the former the family was a bunch of rebellious adolescents challenging their parents all the time, while for the latter the family was a set of “good” children who always did what their authoritarian parents told them to do.
Closely connected to authority relationships are assumptions about how open and personal relationships should be in the organization. In some organizations, employees are expected to be open about everything—even their feelings toward their bosses and each other. Such organizations are the exception. More common are norms that define clear boundaries about what can and cannot be talked about at work, and what can and cannot be said to the boss or to a subordinate. In some organizations, the assumption is that one leaves one’s personal and family life at the door when entering the workplace. I know of a case where an employee’s wife committed suicide, yet the employee continued to come to work as if nothing had happened. Others in the organization did not discover his tragedy for six months.
In DEC, people socialized with each other a good deal, especially because of the pattern of two-day off-site “woods meetings” where the work group would be together around the clock. In Ciba-Geigy, certain families got together for dinners, and at the annual meetings there would be one afternoon and evening planned for deliberately letting hair down by having the whole group engage in some novel sport that brought everyone down to the same level of incompetence, followed by an informal dinner. In Silicon Valley, many companies use social events such as parties, ski trips, weekends in San Francisco, and the like as rewards for their employees. In some instances, only the employee team is invited, while in others the spouses are included as well.
The point again is that each organization develops its own cultural assumptions about the degree to which employees are expected to become close to each other. I was told that at Apple people get very close on project teams, but that once the project is finished the friendships don’t last. At HP, on the other hand, once friendships are formed they last, even if someone leaves the company.
Questions for the Reader
Ask yourself and others:
• How appropriate is it to interrupt the boss when he or she is speaking?
• If you disagree with the boss, do you feel encouraged or discouraged to voice your disagreement face-to-face? Is it OK to disagree in front of others, or do you have to seek the boss out and disagree privately?
• Does your boss level with you about your performance, or do you have to guess how you are doing?
• If your boss asks you to evaluate him or her, how comfortable would you be saying exactly what you think and feel?
• How would your subordinates answer these questions in regard to you as the boss?
• Can you bring family and personal problems to work, or are you expected to keep them separate from work and private? Do you share with your colleagues or boss the problems you are having at home?
• If you and your partner are in a dual-career situation and you have to go home, say, to tend to a child, do you feel comfortable explaining the situation, or do you feel you have to invent an ironclad excuse to go home (perhaps taking a sick day or vacation day)?
• When you are at an informal event with your colleagues or boss, what kinds of things do you talk about? How comfortable are you in socializing with others in the organization? How many of them are friends whom you see regularly?
Again, keep in mind that there are no right answers. Cultures differ, and any given culture can work under one set of circumstances yet be completely dysfunctional under others.
How Rewards and Status Are Allocated
Every organization develops a reward-and-status system. The most obvious form is pay increases and promotion up the ladder. But organizational cultures differ in the meanings attached to these and other kinds of rewards. In some organizations and for some employees, promotions and monetary rewards such as salary, bonus, stock options, and profit sharing are the primary rewards and sources of status. In other organizations, it is titles that matter, or the number of subordinates who report to you.
What employees care about is often a function of the subculture that they are in, based on occupational background and their “Career Anchor.”2 Sales and marketing employees will care about the kinds of territories they are given, financial employees will care about the support they receive from general management in enforcing their policies and procedures, manufacturing employees will care about the size of their budget for maintenance and purchase of new equipment. Engineers and scientists in the R&D function will care about the size of their project, the project budget, the degree of autonomy with regard to working hours, the visibility they have in the organization, the degree to which senior management consults them about strategic issues, their professional status outside the organization, and opportunities for further learning and development in their area of expertise.
One of the most difficult tasks facing the newcomer in an organization is to decipher the reward-and-status system. What kind of behavior is expected, and how do you know when you are doing the right or wrong thing? What kind of behavior is rewarded, and what kind punished? How do you know when you have been rewarded or punished? One of the most common complaints of employees and managers alike is “I don’t know how I’m doing; I don’t get any useful feedback.” Performance appraisal systems are supposed to provide feedback, but most managers complain that they find it very awkward to be open in talking to their employees about their performance. To deal with this problem, some organizations are experimenting with complex feedback systems, such as “360-degree feedback,” in which data are collected from a given employee’s boss, peers, and subordinates; amalgamated; and then given back to the employee. But even in these cases, it is surprising how often the person feels he or she cannot really “read” the signals as to whether he or she has been rewarded or punished, or neither. Of course, the degree to which such systems are open depends on the cultural assumptions about the nature of relationships, as we have discussed.
Questions for the Reader
Ask yourself and others:
• In your work situation, what do you consider to be a reward or a punishment?
• What signals do you pay attention to in order to figure out how you are doing?
• When others receive visible rewards, is it clear to you what they did to deserve them? When others are punished, how do you know they are being punished, and is it clear what they did to deserve the punishment?
• Can you identify the people with higher and lower status in your organization, and is it clear to you what their status rests on?
The Bottom Line
Once you answer questions such as these, you have partially deciphered your corporate culture and some of its subcultures. In Chapter Five I will describe a more systematic process to further such deciphering in relation to a problem you are trying to solve. But even as you gain insight into some elements of your organization’s culture and subcultures, you must be aware that you and your organization exist in a larger country culture in which tacit assumptions have grown up about more fundamental issues such as time, space, reality, and human nature. How organizations manage their external survival and internal integration issues is very much correlated with broader assumptions that come into play, especially when organizations become global and need to work with partners or subsidiaries in other countries.
..................Content has been hidden....................
You can't read the all page of ebook, please click here login for view all page.