User:Tiflal/organizational culture sandbox

To add: Watkins, Michael D. “What is organizational culture? And why should I care?” Harvard Business Review, May 14, 2013. https://hbr.org/2013/05/what-is-organizational-culture

Cultural Organization Typology

Many factors can contribute to the type of culture which is observed in organizations and institutions of all sizes. Typology refers to the "study of or analysis or classification based on types or categories." One may find organizational culture and climate used interchangeably, but this is not the case. Organizational culture has been described as an organization's ideals, vision, and mission, whereas climate is better defined as employees' shared meaning related to the company's policies and procedures and reward/consequence systems. Schein offers a "multi-layered approach to defining organizational culture that distinguishes between the layers, i.e. value and norms, artifacts, and assumptions. Determining an organization's culture

Strong versus weak culture

Flamholtz and Randle state that: "A strong culture is one that people clearly understand and can articulate. A weak culture is one in which employees have difficulty defining, understanding, or explaining." A strong organizational culture tends toward staff who can respond to stimulus due to alignment with organizational values. Conversely, a weak culture may have little alignment with organizational values, with control exercised through procedures and bureaucracy. Research shows that organizations that foster strong cultures have clear values that give employees a reason to embrace the culture. Organizations may derive the following benefits from developing strong and productive cultures, such as stronger employee alignment with company vision and mission, organizational goals achievement, higher employee motivation and loyalty, increased team cohesion, and increased organizational efficiency.

Irving Janis define groupthink as "a mode of thinking that people engage in when they are deeply involved in a cohesive in-group, when the members' strivings for unanimity override their motivation to realistically appraise alternative courses of action." This is a state in which even if group members have different ideas, they do not challenge organizational thinking. As a result, innovative thinking is stifled. Groupthink can lead to lack of creativity and decisions made without critical evaluation. Groupthink can occur, for example, when group members rely heavily on a central charismatic figure in the organization or where there is an "evangelical" belief in the organization's values. Groupthink can also occur in groups characterized by a friendly climate conducive to conflict avoidance.

Healthy culture

Culture is the organization's immune system. – Michael Watkins

What Is Organizational Culture? And Why Should We Care? – Harvard Business Review

Organizations should strive for what is considered a "healthy" organizational culture in order to increase productivity, growth, efficiency and reduce counterproductive behavior and turnover of employees. A variety of characteristics describe a healthy culture, including:

• Acceptance and appreciation for diversity
• Regard for fair treatment of each employee as well as respect for each employee's contribution to the company
• Employee pride and enthusiasm for the organization and the work performed
• Equal opportunity for each employee to realize their full potential within the company
• Strong communication with all employees regarding policies and company issues
• Strong company leaders with a strong sense of direction and purpose
• Ability to compete in industry innovation and customer service, as well as price
• Lower than average turnover rates (perpetuated by a healthy culture)
• Investment in learning, training, and employee knowledge

Additionally, performance oriented cultures have been shown to possess statistically better financial growth. Such cultures possess high employee involvement, strong internal communications and an acceptance and encouragement of a healthy level of risk-taking in order to achieve innovation. Additionally, organizational cultures that explicitly emphasize factors related to the demands placed on them by industry technology and growth will be better performers in their industries.

According to Kotter and Heskett (1992), organizations with adaptive cultures perform much better than organizations with unadaptive cultures. An adaptive culture translates into organizational success; it is characterized by managers paying close attention to all of their constituencies, especially customers, initiating change when needed, and taking risks. An unadaptive culture can significantly reduce a firm's effectiveness, disabling the firm from pursuing all its competitive/operational options.

Healthy companies are able to deal with employees' concerns about the well-being of the organization internally, before the employees would even feel they needed to raise the issues externally. It is for this reason that whistleblowing, particularly when it results in serious damage to a company's reputation, is considered to be often a sign of a chronically dysfunctional corporate culture. Another relevant concept is the notion of "cultural functionality". Specifically, some organizations have "functional" cultures while others have "dysfunctional" cultures. A "functional" culture is a positive culture that contributes to an organization's performance and success. A "dysfunctional" culture is one that hampers or negatively affects an organization's performance and success.

Put under "Communication"

Corporate communication has evolved to mean much more than public relations and now incorporates all aspects of how an organization is portrayed to all stakeholders, including its employees.

Fantasy Themes are common creative interpretations of events that reflect beliefs, values, and goals of the organization. They lead to rhetorical visions, or views of the organization and its environment held by organization members.

Management types of communication (CONFUSING CLIMATE WITH CULTURE - REMOVE)

There are many different types of communication that contribute in creating an organizational culture:^[7]

• Metaphors such as comparing an organization to a machine or a family reveal employees' shared meanings of experiences at the organization.
• Stories can provide examples for employees of how to or not to act in certain situations.
• Rites and ceremonies combine stories, metaphors, and symbols into one. Several different kinds of rites affect organizational culture:
  • Rites of passage: employees move into new roles
  • Rites of degradation: employees have power taken away from them
  • Rites of enhancement: public recognition for an employee's accomplishments
  • Rites of renewal: improve existing social structures
  • Rites of conflict reduction: resolve arguments between certain members or groups
  • Rites of integration: reawaken feelings of membership in the organization
• Reflexive comments are explanations, justifications, and criticisms of our own actions. This includes:
  • Plans: comments about anticipated actions
  • Commentaries: comments about action in the present
  • Accounts: comments about an action or event that has already occurred

Such comments reveal interpretive meanings held by the speaker as well as the social rules they follow.

• Fantasy Themes are common creative interpretations of events that reflect beliefs, values, and goals of the organization. They lead to rhetorical visions, or views of the organization and its environment held by organization members.^[8]

Bullying culture type

Main articles: Bullying culture and Workplace bullying

Bullying is seen to be prevalent in organizations where employees and managers feel that they have the support, or at least implicitly the blessing, of senior managers to carry on their abusive and bullying behaviour. Furthermore, new managers will quickly come to view this form of behaviour as acceptable and normal if they see others get away with it and are even rewarded for it.^[9]

When bullying happens at the highest levels, the effects may be far reaching. That people may be bullied irrespective of their organisational status or rank, including senior managers, indicates the possibility of a negative ripple effect, where bullying may be cascaded downwards as the targeted supervisors might offload their own aggression on their subordinates. In such situations, a bullying scenario in the boardroom may actually threaten the productivity of the entire organisation.^[10]

Culture of fear type (CONFUSING CLIMATE WITH CULTURE - REMOVE)

Main article: Culture of fear

Ashforth discussed potentially destructive sides of leadership and identified what he referred to as petty tyrants, i.e. leaders who exercise a tyrannical style of management, resulting in a climate of fear in the workplace. Partial or intermittent negative reinforcement can create an effective climate of fear and doubt. When employees get the sense that bullies "get away with it", a climate of fear may be the result. Several studies have confirmed a relationship between bullying, on the one hand, and an autocratic leadership and an authoritarian way of settling conflicts or dealing with disagreements, on the other. An authoritarian style of leadership may create a climate of fear, where there is little or no room for dialogue and where complaining may be considered futile.

In a study of public-sector union members, approximately one in five workers reported having considered leaving the workplace as a result of witnessing bullying taking place. Rayner explained these figures by pointing to the presence of a climate of fear in which employees considered reporting to be unsafe, where bullies had "got away with it" previously despite management knowing of the presence of bullying.

Tribal type of culture

David Logan and coauthors have proposed in their book Tribal Leadership that organizational cultures change in stages, based on an analysis of human groups and tribal cultures. They identify five basic stages:

1. Life sucks (a subsystem severed from other functional systems like tribes, gangs and prison—2 percent of population);
2. My life sucks (I am stuck in the Dumb Motor Vehicle line and can't believe I have to spend my time in this lost triangle of ineffectiveness—25 percent of population);
3. I'm great (and you're not, I am detached from you and will dominate you regardless of your intent—48 percent of population);
4. We are great, but other groups suck (citing Zappo's and an attitude of unification around more than individual competence—22 percent of population) and
5. Life is great (citing Desmond Tutu's hearing on truth and values as the basis of reconciliation—3 percent of population).

This model of organizational culture provides a map and context for leading an organization through the five stages.

Personal culture

Main: Personality psychology, Identity (social science)

Organizational culture is taught to the person as culture is taught by his/her parents thus changing and modeling his/her personal culture. Indeed, employees and people applying for a job are advised to match their "personality to a company's culture" and fit to it. Some researchers even suggested and have made case studies research on personality changing.

National culture type

Corporate culture is used to control, coordinate, and integrate company subsidiaries. However differences in national cultures exist contributing to differences in the views on management. Differences between national cultures are deep rooted values of the respective cultures, and these cultural values can shape how people expect companies to be run, and how relationships between leaders and followers should be, resulting in differences between the employer and the employee regarding expectations. (Geert Hofstede, 1991) Perhaps equally foundational; observing the vast differences in national copyright (and taxation, etc.) laws suggests deep rooted differences in cultural attitudes and assumptions about property rights and sometimes about the desired root function, place, or purpose of corporations relative to the population.

Multiplicity

See also: Biculturalism

Xibao Zhang (2009) carried out an empirical study of culture emergence in the Sino-Western international cross-cultural management (SW-ICCM) context in China. Field data were collected by interviewing Western expatriates and Chinese professionals working in this context, supplemented by non-participant observation and documentary data. The data were then analyzed objectively to formulate theme-based substantive theories and a formal theory.

The major finding of this study is that the human cognition contains three components, or three broad types of "cultural rules of behavior", namely, Values, Expectations, and Ad Hoc Rules, each of which has a mutually conditioning relationship with behavior. The three cognitive components are different in terms of the scope and duration of their mutual shaping of behavior. Values are universal and enduring rules of behavior; Expectations, on the other hand, are context-specific behavioral rules; while Ad Hoc Rules are improvised rules of behavior that the human mind devises contingent upon a particular occasion. Furthermore, they need not be consistent, and frequently are not, among themselves. Metaphorically, they can be compared to a multi-carriage train, which allows for the relative lateral movements by individual carriages so as to accommodate bumps and turns in the tracks. In fact, they provide a "shock-absorber mechanism", so to speak, which enables individuals in SW-ICCM contexts to cope with conflicts in cultural practices and values, and to accommodate and adapt themselves to cultural contexts where people from different national cultural backgrounds work together over extended time. It also provides a powerful framework which explains how interactions by individuals in SW-ICCM contexts give rise to emerging hybrid cultural practices characterized by both stability and change.

One major theoretical contribution of this "multi-carriage train" perspective is its allowance for the existence of inconsistencies among the three cognitive components in their mutual conditioning of behavior. This internal inconsistency view is in stark contrast to the traditional internal consistency assumption explicitly or tacitly held by many culture scholars. The other major theoretical contribution, which follows logically from the first one, is to view culture as an overarching entity which is made of a multiplicity of Values, Expectations, and Ad Hoc Rules. This notion of one (multiplicity) culture to an organization leads to the classification of culture along its path of emergence into nascent, adolescent, and mature types, each of which is distinct in terms of the pattern of the three cognitive components and behavior.