Totalitarian Aspects of Corporate Culture
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As Edgar Schein (1999), one of the most prominent scholars on organizational culture, noted, Culture is deep, extensive, and stable. It cannot be taken lightly. If you do not manage culture, it manages you.
As the labour market shifted away from the Fordism and its 5 dollar a day, replaceable workforce, the soul of the employee became a more central element in managing organisations and gaining a competitive advantage. As shown quite early by the McKinsey 7s model, managers and the gurus of excellence noticed that culture may be a, until know not totally measured, source of success.
To use culture as a management tool, your workforce should not only share the companys goals but see them as their own, and the most efficient way to achieve them is to go the extra mile. The new wave of management theory, including HRM and TQM, explored several ways to pay meaning as well as money to generate a high rate of identification within the organisation. Making the average Joe feeling as a winner by inviting him to understand that identification with the corporate goals ensures their autonomy is the simultaneous negation and affirmation of autonomy. This allows the implication, that corporate culture as a theory may not fulfil its prospects in practice (see HSBC case).
The book 1984 by George Orwell incorporates totalitarian aspects of culture not in an organisation but in a whole country. The most important aspect Orwell shows are:
Double Think, where you convince yourself of a lie, this can be transferred on corporate culture in so far that employees think the organisation is “good” and all their goals and means to achieve these goals are “good”.
Newspeak is a new language which is developed to narrow down the language and through that the possibilities of thought. In big organisations the language which is used is only understandable for people who are in the organisation and long explanations are made redundant.
Crimestop is a thinking technique where you make yourself feel bad if you think about a breach of rules. In a corporation this can be applied on workers who make themselves feel ashamed or bad if they do not perform well and so try to comply with all goals of the company.
We regard that corporate culture is mandatory for every organisations framework hence it becomes clear that strong corporate culture remain a risky and expensive management tool in which credibility and authenticity are the key factors for a successful implementation.