Organizational Culture & Leadership
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Organizational Culture & Leadership
“Some are born great,
some achieve greatness,
and some have greatness thrust upon em”
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
Ð* Culture a phenomenon that surrounds us all.
Ð* Culture helps us understand how it is created, embedded, developed, manipulated, managed, and changed.
Ð* Culture defines leadership.
Ð* Understand the culture to understand the organization.
Defining Organizational Culture
Ð* Culture is customs and rights.
Ð* Good managers must work from a more anthropological model.
Ð* Each org has its own way and an outsider brings his/her baggage as observer.
Ð* Understand new environment and culture before change or observation can be made.
Observe behavior: language, customs, traditions
Groups norms: standards and values
Espoused values: published, publicly announced values.
Formal Philosophy: mission
Rules of the Game: rules to all in org
Climate: climate of group in interaction
Embedded skills:
Habits of thinking, acting, paradigms: Shared knowledge for socialization.
Shared meanings of the group
Metaphors or symbols:
Ð* Culture: norms, values, behavior patterns, rituals, traditions.
Ð* Culture implies structural stability and Patterning and integration.
Ð* Culture is the accumulated shared learning from shared history.
Ð* 2 problems all groups must deal with:
1. survival, growth, and adaptation in environment
2. internal integration that permits functioning and adapting.
Culture Formally Defined
A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way you perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.
Ð* The problem of socialization: teaching newcomers
Ð* The problem of behavior:
Ð* Can a large org have one culture? subcultures.
Summary
Ð* culture explains incomprehensible, irrational
Ð* org with history has culture.
Ð* Not every group develops a culture.
Ð* Once culture exists it determines criteria of leadership.
Ð* Leaders should be conscious of culture otherwise it will manage them.
Levels of Culture
Artifacts
Ð* on surface
sees
hears
feels
Ð* visible products
Language
technology
products
creations
style: clothing, manners of address, myths, stories
Ð* easy to observe
Ð* difficult to decipher
Ð* symbols are ambiguous
Ð* Problems in classification
Espoused Values
Ð* all group learning reflects original values
Ð* those who prevail influence group: the leaders
Ð* first begins as shared value then becomes shared assumption
Ð* social validation happens with shared learning.
Ð* initially started by founder, leader and then assimilated.
Basic Assumptions
Ð* evolve as solution to problem is repeated over and over again.
Ð* hypothesis becomes reality
Ð* to learn something new requires resurrection, reexamination, frame breaking
Ð* Culture defines us:
what we pay attention to
what things mean
react emotionally
what actions to take when
Ð* humans need cognitive stability
defense mechanisms
Ð* McGregor: if people are treated consistently in terms of certain basic assumptions, they come eventually to behave according to those assumptions in order to make their world stable and predictable.
Ð* different cultures make different assumptions about others based on own values etc: see them with our eyes not theirs.
Ð* third party may help solve differences between 2 cultures
Ð* each new member comes with own assumptions.
Culture of 2 orgs
Case study of 2 distinct companies illustrating multilevel