Chapter 16 Organizational Culture Page 587
a.
B. Culture and Sustainability
1. As the name implies, sustainability refers to practices that can be maintained
sustainability as an important part of future success.
2. Social sustainability practices address the ways social systems are affected by
an organization’s actions over time, and in turn, how changing social systems
may affect the organization.
businesses.
b. In a very different context, 3M has an innovative pollution-prevention
program rooted in cultural principles of conserving resources, creating
3. Sustainable management doesn’t need to be purely altruistic.
4. To create a truly sustainable business, an organization must develop a
long-term culture and put its values into practice.
sustainability!
b. In one workplace study, a company seeking to reduce energy consumption
found that soliciting group feedback reduced energy use significantly more
conservation.
c. In other words, talking about energy conservation and building the value
into the organizational culture resulted in positive employee behavioral
changes.
5. Like other cultural practices we’ve discussed, sustainability needs time and
nurturing to grow.
C. Culture and Innovation
unconventional, collaborative, vision-driven, accelerating cultures.
2. Startup firms often have innovative cultures because they are usually small,
D. Culture as an Asset
many ways.
2. There are many more cases of business success stories due to excellent
E. Culture as a Liability
1. Introduction
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consistency of employee behavior.
2. Institutionalization
a. When an organization undergoes institutionalization and becomes
or members.
b. It doesn’t go out of business even if its original goals are no longer
relevant.
end in itself.
3. Barriers to change
c. Where there is rapid change, an entrenched culture may no longer be
appropriate.
4. Barriers to diversity
people attempt to fit in.
b. Strong culture can be liabilities when they effectively eliminate the unique
differences.
5. Toxicity and Dysfunctions
a. Coherence around negativity and dysfunctional management systems in a
toxic.
i. For example, research on 862 bank employees over about 150
branches of a large bank in the US suggests that branch managers
within each branch.
b. Collaborative cultures (i.e., encouraging proactive, constructive, and
collaborative conflict resolution) tended to increase the cohesion and
cultures (i.e., that passively avoid conflict) tend to be less creative.
6. Barriers to acquisitions and mergers
a. Cultural compatibility has become the primary concern when considering
acquisitions and/or mergers.
b. A survey by Bain and Company revealed that 70 percent of mergers failed
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to increase shareholder values.
i. The $183 billion merger between America Online (AOL) and Time
Warner in 2001 was the largest in U.S. corporate history.
ii. It was also a disaster. Only 2 years later, the stock had fallen an
astounding 90 percent, and the new company reported what was then
the largest financial loss in U.S. history.
iii. Recent research on acquisitions in the Taiwanese electronics industry
suggests that the success of mergers and acquisitions hinge upon how
the acquisition was acquired, the organizational structure (e.g.,
centralization and divisional integration), as well as the organizational
culture.
II. Creating and Sustaining Culture
A. Introduction
1. Once an organization’s culture is established it rarely fades away.
B. How a Culture Begins
1. Ultimate source of an organization’s culture is its founders.
2. Founders have a vision of what the organization should be.
3. Unconstrained by previous ideologies or customs.
4. New organizations are typically small; facilitates the founders’ imparting of
their vision on all organizational members.
5. Culture creation occurs in three ways:
a. Founders hire employees who think and feel the way they do.
b. Employees are indoctrinated and socialized into the founders’ way of
thinking.
c. Founders’ behavior acts as a role model.
C. Keeping a Culture Alive
1. Selection
a. The explicit goal of the selection process is to identify and hire individuals
with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to perform successfully.
b. The final decision, because it’s significantly influenced by the decision
maker’s judgment of how well the candidates will fit into the organization,
identifies people whose values are essentially consistent with at least a
good portion of the organization’s.
c. Selection also provides information to applicants.
d. Those who perceive a conflict between their values and those of the
organization can remove themselves from the applicant pool.
e. Selection thus becomes a two-way street, allowing employer or applicant
to avoid a mismatch and sustaining an organization’s culture by selecting
out those who might attack or undermine its core values.
2. Top management
a. The actions of top management also have a major impact on the
organization’s culture.
i. Through words and behavior, senior executives establish norms that
filter through the organization about, for instance, whether risk taking
is desirable, how much freedom managers give employees, what is
appropriate dress, and what actions earn pay raises, promotions, and
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other rewards.
3. Socialization (Exhibit 16-2)
a. The process of helping new employees adapt to the organization’s culture
is called socialization.
b. Three stage process:
i. Pre-arrival
(a) Recognizes that each individual arrives with a set of values,
attitudes, and expectations.
ii. Encounter
(a) Individual confronts the possible dichotomy between expectations
and reality.
(b) If expectations accurate, the encounter stage merely cements
earlier perceptions.
(c) However, this is often not the case.
(d) At the extreme, a new member may become disillusioned enough
to resign.
(e) Proper recruiting, selection, and socialization tactics (e.g., giving a
coworkers help them “learn the ropes.”
iii. Metamorphosis (Exhibit 16-3)
(a) Process of working out any problems discovered during the
encounter stage.
(b) The options presented in Exhibit 16-3 are alternatives designed to
bring about the desired metamorphosis.
socialization practices.
(i) The more management relies on formal, collective, sequential,
fixed, and serial socialization programs and emphasize
divestiture, the more likely newcomers’ differences will be
stripped away and replaced by standardized predictable
behaviors.
value rule following and order.
(ii) Programs that are informal, individual, random, variable, and
disjunctive and emphasize investiture are more likely to give
newcomers an innovative sense of their role and methods of
working.
practices.
(d) Most research suggests high levels of institutional practices
encourage person–organization fit and high levels of commitment,
whereas individual practices produce more role innovation.
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procedures, and informally accepted practices as well.
iii. They know what is expected of them and what criteria will be used to
measure and evaluate their work.
d. As Exhibit 16-2 showed, successful metamorphosis should have a positive
impact on new employees’ productivity and their commitment to the
months.
i. One study has documented patterns of “honeymoons” and “hangovers”
for new workers, showing that the period of initial adjustment is often
marked by decreases in job satisfaction as their idealized hopes come
into contact with the reality of organizational life.
and satisfaction.
iii. It may be that the initial adjustment period for newcomers presents
increasing demands and difficulties, at least in the short term.
D. Summary: How Cultures Form (Exhibit 16-4)
1. Exhibit 16-4 summarizes how an organization’s culture is established and
sustained.
behavior and what is not.
4. The way employees are socialized will depend both on the degree of success
achieved in matching new employees’ values to those of the organization in
the selection process, and on top management’s preference for socialization
methods.
III. How Employees Learn Culture
A. Introduction
and language.
B. Stories
1. Stories such as these circulate through many organizations, anchoring the
present in the past and legitimating current practices.
2. They typically include narratives about the organization’s founders, rule
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or not fit with the organization during the process of socialization, including
first days on the job, early interactions with others, and first impressions of
organizational life.
C. Rituals
the organization are rituals.
D. Symbols
1. Layout of corporation headquarters, types of automobiles top executives are
given, aircraft, size of offices, executive perks, etc. are examples of material
symbols, sometimes also known as “atrifacts.”
E. Language
1. Many organizations and subunits within them use language to help members
identify with the culture, attest to their acceptance of it, and help preserve it.
2. Unique terms describe equipment, officers, key individuals, suppliers,
customers, or products that relate to the business.
culture or subculture.
IV. Influencing an Organizational Culture
A. Developing an Ethical Culture
1. How can management create a more ethical culture?
a. Be a visible role model.
b. Communicate ethical expectations.
i. Code of ethics can minimize ethical ambiguities.
c. Provide ethical training.
i. Training sessions that reinforce standards of conduct and clarify
permissible practices.
behavior against code of ethics.
e. Provide protective mechanisms.
i. Creation of ethical counselors, ombudsmen, or ethical officers.
2. The work of setting a positive ethical climate must start at the top of the
organization.
more likely to practice ethical leadership.
i. Positive ethical attitudes transfer down to line employees, who show
lower levels of deviant behavior and higher levels of cooperation and
assistance.
b. A study involving auditors found perceived pressure from organizational
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engage in unethical practices.
c. Clearly the wrong type of organizational culture can negatively influence
employee ethical behavior.
d. Conversely, ethical leadership has been shown to improve group ethical
voice, or the extent to which employees feel comfortably speaking up
culture.
e. Finally, employees whose ethical values are similar to those of their
department are more likely to be promoted, so we can think of ethical
culture as flowing from the bottom up as well.
V. Developing a Positive Culture
A. Introduction
organizational culture.
2. A positive organizational culture emphasizes building on employee
strengths, rewards more than it punishes, and emphasizes individual vitality
growth.
B. Building on Employee Strengths
C. Rewarding More Than Punishing
1. Although most organizations are sufficiently focused on extrinsic rewards
such as pay and promotions, they often forget about the power of smaller (and
cheaper) rewards such as praise.
2. Part of creating a positive organizational culture is “catching employees doing
something right.”
D. Emphasizing Vitality and Growth
1. No organization will get the best from employees who see themselves as mere
cogs in the machine.
2. A positive culture recognizes the difference between a job and a career. It
supports not only what the employee contributes to organizational
effective—personally and professionally.
3. Although it may take more creativity to encourage employee growth in some
types of industries, consider the food industry.
E. Limits of Positive Culture
1. Not a panacea for all companies.
2. All cultures don’t value being positive.
effectiveness.
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VI. Spirituality and Organizational Culture
A. What Is Spirituality?
about God or theology.
2. Workplace spirituality recognizes that people have an inner life that
nourishes and is nourished by meaningful work that takes place in the context
of community.
B. Why Spirituality Now? (Exhibit 16-5)
model.
3. But just as we’ve now come to realize that the study of emotions improves our
understanding of organizational behavior, an awareness of spirituality can help
us better understand employee behavior in the twenty-first century.
4. Of course, employees have always had an inner life. So why has the search for
meaning and purposefulness in work surfaced now?
5. Summarized reasons in Exhibit 16-5.
C. Characteristics of a Spiritual Organization
values, ethics, motivation, and leadership.
2. Although research remains preliminary, several cultural characteristics tend to
be evident in spiritual organizations.
a. Benevolence.
i. Spiritual organizations value showing kindness towards others and
stakeholders.
b. Strong sense of purpose.
i. Spiritual organizations build their cultures around a meaningful
purpose.
(a) Although profits may be important, they’re not the primary value
of the organization.
c. Trust and respect.
openness.
ii. Employees are treated with esteem and value, consistent with the
dignity of each individual.
d. Open-mindedness.
i. Spiritual organizations value flexible thinking and creativity among
employees.
D. Achieving a Spiritual Organization
putting its principles into practice.
2. Several types of practices can facilitate a spiritual workplace, including those
that support work-life balance.
3. Leaders can demonstrate values, attitudes, and behaviors that trigger intrinsic
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E. Criticisms of Spirituality
1. Critics of the spirituality movement in organizations have focused on three
issues.
a. First is the question of scientific foundation. What really is workplace
spirituality?
spiritualty.
3. An emphasis on spirituality can clearly make some employees uneasy.
a. Critics have argued that secular institutions, especially business firms,
have no business imposing spiritual values on employees.
b. This criticism is undoubtedly valid when spirituality is defined as bringing
religion and God into the workplace.
VII. Global Implications
A. We considered global cultural values (collectivism–individualism, power distance,
and so on) in Chapter 5. Here our focus is a bit narrower.
1. How is organizational culture affected by a global context?
2. But that doesn’t mean organizations should, or could, be blissfully ignorant of
local culture.
B. Organizational cultures often reflect national culture.
friendships.
a. The carrier has lots of parties, participative management, and no private
offices, reflecting Malaysia’s relatively collectivistic culture.
2. However, the culture of many U.S. airlines does not reflect the same degree of
informality.
cultural differences into account.
3. So when an organization opens up operations in another country, it ignores the
local culture at its own risk.