Organizational Culture and Performance Essay

The concept of organizational enculturation has drawn circumspection to the long-neglected, subjective or soft side of organizational life. However, numerous sayings of organizational civilization relieve oneself non received much(prenominal) attention. Instead, dialect has been placed primarily on the cultural and symbolic aspects that ar relevant in an implemental/pragmatic context. The technological cognitive interest prevails. Culture then is treated as an object of charge action. In this regard, Ouchi and Wilkins (1985 462) none that the contemporary student of organizational socialization ofttimes takes the organization not as a natural solution to deep and universal forces provided rather as a intellectual instrument foundinged by top watchfulness to shape the behavior of the employees in purposive ways. Accordingly, much research on corporate finis and organizational symbolism is dominated by a preoccupation with a check set of meanings, symbols, value, and ideas presumed to be manageable and directly related to effectiveness and performance.This is in m some(prenominal) ways understandable, that t here atomic number 18 two major problems following from this emphasis. One is that galore(postnominal) aspects of organizational tillage ar simply disregarded. It seems strange that the (major part of the) literature should generally disregard such(prenominal) values as bureaucratic-meritocratic hierarchy, unequal distrisolelyion of privileges and rewards, a mixture of individualism and conformity, male domination, emphasis on m iodiney, economic growth, consumerism, advanced technology, exploitation of nature, and the equation of economic criteria with rationality. Instrumental reason dominates quantifiable values and the optimization of means for the attainment of pre-given ends define rationality (Horkheimer and Adorno, 1947 Marcuse, 1964). Mainstream organizational nuance opinion in organizations but also in academia tend t o take this for granted.The values and ideas to which organizational glossiness research pays attention are primarily machine-accessible with the means and operations employed to achieve pre-defined and unquesti aced coatings. A blink of an eye problem is that subordinating organizational finale intellection to narrowly defined instrumental concerns also reduces the effectiveness of culture to aid managerial action. organizational culture calls for considerations that break with some of the assumptions characterizing technical thinking, i.e. the idea that a particular in gear up leads to a predictable effect. This chapter frankincense shows some problems associated with the use of the circumstance culture that does not take the idea of culture seriously enough and presses the concept into a limited version of the technical cognitive interest. It argues for a softer version of this interest as well as for thinking following the otherwise two cognitive interests (as sk etc .ed in Chapter 1).A basic problem in much circumspection thinking and writing is an impatience in showing the great potential of organizational culture. Associated with this is a bias for a premature distinction between the slap-up and the bad values and ideas, trivialization of culture, everyplacestressing the role of management and the employment of causative thinking. Premature normativity the idea of trusty culture Associated with the technical interest of optimizing means for accomplishment of goals is an underdeveloped competency to reflect upon normative matters. Viewing cultures as means leads to paygrades of them as more or little good, i.e. as useful, without consideration whether this goodness is the same as usefulness or if usefulness may be accreditedly multidimensional.The more popular literature argues that good or valuable cultures often equated with inexpugnable cultures are characterized by norms beneficial to the high society, to customers, and to m an gracious and by good performance in general Good cultures are characterized by norms and values supportive of excellence, teamwork, profit great power, honesty, a customer service orientation, pride in ones work, and commitment to the organization. Most of all, they are supportive of adaptability the capacity to thrive over the long run contempt new competition, new regulations, new technological developments, and the strains of growth. (Baker, 1980 10)Good cultures are, harmonize to this author, cultures that incorporate all good things in peaceful co-existence. Also many other authors eager to appeal to practitioners focus on highly positive-sounding virtues, attitudes, and conduct claimed to be useful to the achievement of corporate goals as defined by management (e.g. Deal and Kennedy, 1982 photoflash and Beyer, 1985). They are largely instrumental in character, without considering any ambiguity of the virtue of culture or what it purportedly accomplished in terms of goal realization. The assumption that culture domiciliate be simply evaluated in terms of right and prostitute come through in embarrassing statements such as that the wrong values make the culture a major liability (Wiener, 1988 536) has already been mentioned. Similarly, Kilmann et al. (1985 4) argue that a culture has a positive impact on an organization when it points behavior in the right direction.Alternatively, a culture has negative impact when it points behavior in the wrong direction. According to Wilkins and Patterson (1985 272) The ideal culture is characterized by a clear assumption of equity a clear sense of collective competency and an ability to continually apply the collective competence to new situations as well as to falsify it when necessary. Kanter (1983) talks about cultures of pride, which are good, and cultures of inferiority, which any sane person entrust avoid. This persona of functionalist, normative, and instrumentally biased thinking is also found in Scheins (1985) book, in which culture is seen as a pattern of basic assumptions that has proved to be valid for a group coping with problems of external fitting and internal integration. Basically, culture in this literature is instrumental in relation to the formal goals of an organization and to the management objectives or tasks associated with these goals (i.e. external and internal effectiveness). It is assumed to exist because it works or at least apply to work. Of course, alternated circumstances can make a culture dysfunctional calling for planned, intentional change but the approach assumes that culture is or can be good for some worthwhile purpose.As will be sh ingest later good and bad are not, however, self-evident, especially when it comes to complex phenomena such as culture. A bias towards the positive functions of culture and its close relation to issues such as harmony, consensus, clarity, and meaningfulness is also implicit in many of these studies (see Mart in and Meyerson, 1988). Symbols and cultural aspects are often seen as functional (or dysfunctional) for the organization in terms of goal attainment, meeting the emotional-expressive needs of members, reducing tension in communication, and so on. Instrumental/functional dimensions are often emphasized, for instance, in studies of rites and ceremonies (e.g. Dandridge, 1986 Trice and Beyer, 1984). The typical research focus is on social integration (Alvesson, 1987). Culture is mum as (usually or potentially) useful and those aspects of culture that are not comfortably or directly seen as useful remain out of sight, e.g. on gender and ethics.The most common ideas guiding organizational analytic thinking draw upon such metaphors for culture as tool, social glue, need satisfier, or regulator of social relations. Problems hold the premature use of deterrent example judgement, in a way hidden behind technical sense in which culture is viewed as a tool and presumably as easy to eval uate in terms of its goodness as a hammer. But few issues are simply good or bad, functional or dysfunctional. Some things that may be seen as good may be less positive from another angle. A clear sense of collective competence to connect to the citation preceding(prenominal) does in itself sound positive and is good for self-esteem and commitment, but a high level of boldness may be a mixed blessing as it easily forms a part of, or leads to, fantasies of omnipotence, and may obstruct openness, disapproval, willingness to listen to critique and take new external ideas seriously (Brown and Starkey, 2000).Cultural themes thus call for careful consideration, where normative judgement should be applied with great caution. Normative talk easily pr compensatets more nuanced interpretation. Trivialization of culture As argued above, the consequence of the functionalist/pragmatic approach is that culture tends to be reduced to those limited aspects of this complex phenomenon that are p erceived to be directly related to organizational efficiency and agonistic reinforcement (see, e.g. Barney, 1986 Kilmann et al., 1985). This means a rather selected interest in organizational culture. But much worse is a tendency to emphasize mainly the superficial aspects of these selected parts of organizational culture. These superficial aspects have the advantage that they are compatible with technical thinking, presumably accessible to managerial interventions.Culture may even be equated with authorized behavioral norms viewed as an excellent vehicle for helping people understand and manage the cultural aspects of organizational life (Allen, 1985 334). In marketing, market-oriented culture is frequently defined as the key to strong performances (Harris and Ogbonna, 1999), culture here implying certain behaviours. The problem, of course, is that norms are not the best vehicle for understanding culture. Whereas norms tell people how to behave, culture has a much broader and m ore complex influence on thinking, feeling, and sense-making (Schneider, 1976). Again, Barney (1986), Pfeffer (1994) and others argue that to serve as a commencement of sustained competitive advantage culture must be valuable, rare, and imperfectly imitable. If this statement is to make any sense at all, culture must be interpreted as highly normative, accessible to evaluation in terms of frequency (i.e. quantifiable), and capable of being copied at will.This conception deprives culture of the richness that is comm wholly seen as its specialness. At the same time, any culture may be seen as vital for competitive advantage (or as disadvantage), as it is arguably, highly significant and not easy to imitate. As Pfeffer (1994), among others, notes, many of the earlier identified sources of competitive advantage, such as economies of scale, harvest-times or process technology, access to financial resources and protected or regulated markets, move of diminishing significance as a con sequence of more fragmented markets with an increase need for flexibility in production, shorter product life cycle, internationalizations and de-regulations. A companys competence and ability to manage people to a considerable degree overlapping organizational culture are not easy to imitate.Even to describe and analyse culture is difficult, as indicated by all the management texts providing only superficial and trivial descriptions of culture, such as norms about market-oriented behaviour. The trivialization of organizational culture is not, however, solely restricted to literary works vivid the quick fix. Despite an effort to define organizational culture on a deeper level, accenting basic assumptions, Schein (1985) in most of his empirical examples tends to address the more superficial aspects. One example concerns the scholarship of a franchised business The insufficiency of understanding of the cultural risks of buying a franchised business was brought out even more clea rly in another case, where a very stuffy, traditional, moralistic company whose management prided itself on its high ethical standards bought a chain of fast-food restaurants that were locally franchised around the country.The companys managers discovered, much to their chagrin, that one of the biggest of these restaurants in a nearby state had become the local brothel. The activities of the town were so well corporate around this restaurant that the alternative of closing it down posed the risk of drawing precisely the kind of attention this company wanted at all costs to avoid. The managers asked themselves, after the fact, Should we have known what our acquirement involved on this more subtle level? Should we have understood our own value administration better, to ensure compatibility? (Schein, 1985 345)Here the problem seems to be lack of knowledge on a very specific point what the company was buying rather than lack of understanding of the companys own value system. Most o rdinary, respectable corporations, whatever their organizational culture, would probably wish to avoid becoming owners of brothels. harlotry is broadly seen as illegitimate, not only by those who Schein views as very stuffy, traditional, moralistic people. Apart from the moral issue, there is of course the risk that bad publicity would follow and harm the company. Managerialization of culture Another aspect of adapting culture to technical concerns, and the reduction of complexity and depth contingent upon such concerns, is the confusion of organizational culture with the firms management political theory. Frequently what is referred to as organizational or corporate culture really stands for the ideals and visions prescribed by top management (Alvesson, 1987 Westley and Jaeger, 1985).It is sometimes held that the best way to investigate corporate culture is through interviews with top managers, but the outcome of this approach tends to be a description of the espoused political orientation of those managers that only skim the culture that surrounds the top executives (Czarniawska-Joerges, 1992 174). Denison (1984) in a survey claiming to study corporate culture, for example asked one manager per company in a large number of companies to fill in a questionnaire. Organizational culture and managerial ideology are in most cases not the same, partly due to the lack of depth of ideology compared to culture, partly due to variation within organizations and discrepancies between top management and other groups. To incompatibleiate between corporate culture as prescribed and manager-led and organizational culture as real culture and more or less emergent from below is one possibility (Anthony, 1994).However, management ideology is not necessarily very different from organizational culture there are cases where management ideology powerfully impregnates cultural patterns (Alvesson, 1995 Kunda, 1992). But this needs to be empirically investigated and shown, and ca nnot be assumed. Management ideology is but one of several expressions of organizational culture. In most discussions of the relationship between culture and performance, authors focus on values espoused by senior managers, to a higher or lower degree shared by larger groups, while the complexity and variety of culture is neglected.1 From a management point of view, the managerialization of organizational culture immediately appears appealing but arguably deeper, less conscious aspects of cultural patterns than those managers are already certain of and promote are more valuable, at least in the long run, to focus on.Rather than smoothing over differences and variations in meanings, ideas and values within organizations, highlighting the latter is significant as a basis of informed management thinking and action. Loosening the grip of premature workingity The three weaknesses of much organizational culture thinking reviewed above are related to the wish to make culture appear as o f immediate interest to practitioners, and to fit into a predominantly technical cognitive interest in which culture is reduced to a tool. Cultural studies should be permitted to develop unrestricted by, or at least more loosely connected to, concerns for practicality. It is important here is to recognize the contradiction between sophisticated thinking and easily applicable practical concernsThe more rigorously (anthropologically) the term (culture) is applied, the more the concept of organizational culture gains in theoretical interpretive power and the more it loses in practicality. In the effort to overcome this contradiction the danger is that theoretical clumsiness will be lost in the interest of practicality. (Westley and Jaeger, 1985 15)Even if one wants to contribute to practicality, rather than to anthropology, this nonetheless calls for another kind of intellectual approach than most of the authors cited above exemplify. Oversimplification and promises of quick fixes do not necessarily serve narrow pragmatic interests, neither those of managers nor of others. Making things look clear-cut and simple may mislead. Practitioners might benefit much more from the pro-managerial and pragmatic organizational culture literature if it stopped promising recipes for how to manage and control culture and instead discussed other phenomena which managers might, with luck and skill, be able to influence for example, specific cultural manifestations, workplace spirit and behavioural norms. Learning to think culturally about organizational cosmos might inspire enlightened managerial everyday action rather than unrealistic programmes for culture change or bending patterns of meaning, ideas and values to managerial will.Before assuming that culture is functional or good for organizational or managerial purposes, it makes sense to distinguish among possible consequences and to recognize that they may conflict. Critical reflection and learning may be a good thing, co nsensus facilitating control and coordinated action another, and reduction of trouble a third but not all these good things may be attainable at the same time and they may contradict each other. Perhaps more important, contradictory interests those of professions, divisions, classes, consumers, environmentalists, the state, owners, top management, etc. may produce different views on what is good, important, and appropriate. Also within complex organizations, corporate goal-attainment may presume considerable variation in cultural orientations. Most aspects of culture are difficult to designate as clearly good or bad. To simplify these relationships runs the risk of producing misleading pictures of cultural manifestations.Instead, the focus must become the tensions between the creative and destructive possibilities of culture formation (Jeffcutt, 1993). Approaches to the cultureperformance relationship in that respect are different ideas regarding to what extent organizational c ulture can be used as a managerial tool. I will point at and discuss three versions of how managers can work with culture. These represent the sexual intercourse significance of management versus culture can management control culture or must management adapt to culture? Cultural engineering corporate culture as managerial design In the most instrumentally oriented of these formulations, culture is conceived as a building block in organizational design a subsystem, well-demarcated from other parts of the organization, which includes norms, values, beliefs, and behavioural styles of employees.Even though it may be difficult to master, it is in principle no different from other parts of the organization in terms of management and control. The term cultural engineering captures the spirit of this position, which is sometimes called the corporate-culture school (Alvesson and Berg, 1992). Kilmann (1985 354) recognizes that there is considerable disagreement about what culture is but co ncludes that it is still important to consider what makes a culture good or bad, adaptive or dysfunctional. He describes culture almost as a physical force Culture provides meaning, direction, and mobilization it is the social energy that moves the corporation into allocation the energy that flows from shared commitments among group members (p. 352) and the force controlling behaviour at every level in the organization (p. 358). He believes that every firm has a characteristic culture that can develop and change quickly and must be managed and controlled If left alone, a culture eventually becomes dysfunctional (p. 354). The underlying metaphor then clearly comes from technical science.The crucial dimension of culture, according to Kilmann, is norms it is here that culture is most easily controlled. More precisely, it is the norms that guide the behaviour and attitudes of the people in the company that are of greatest interest and significance, because they have a powerful effec t on the requirements for its success quality, efficiency, product reliability, customer service, innovation, hard work, loyalty, etc. This is the core of most (American) texts on corporate culture (e.g. Deal and Kennedy, 1982 Peters and Waterman, 1982 Sathe, 1985 Wiener, 1988). There are many difficulties with this model. Norms refer to a too superficial and behaviour-near aspect to really capture culture, at least as defined in this book. Norms and behaviours are affected by many dimensions other than culture. in spite of appearance a culture there are a number of norms related to the enormous variety of different behaviours. The point with culture is that it indicates the meaning dimension, i.e. what is behind and informs norms. A related problem with this behaviour-near view on culture is the tendency to see culture as more or less forcefully affecting behaviour. For example, Sathe (1985 236) argues that the strength of a culture influences the intensity of behavior, and the st rength of a culture is determined by how many important shared assumptions there are, how widely they are shared, and how clearly they are ranked. A strong culture is thus characterized by homogeneity, simplicity, and clearly ordered assumptions.In a complex culture by definition any culture assumptions will probably be very difficult to identify and rank, and it can even be argued that such a measurement approach distorts the phenomena it is supposed to study. As Fitzgerald (1988 910) has put it Values do not exist as isolated, independent, or incremental entities. Beliefs and assumptions, tastes and inclinations, hopes and purposes, values and principles are not modular packages stored on warehouse shelves, waiting for inventory. They have no separate existence, as do coruscation plugs in an engine they cannot be examined one at a time and replaced when burned out. They have their own inner dynamic nationalism, dignity, order, progress, equality, security each implies other v alues, as well as their opposites. Patriotism implies homeland, duty, and honor, but also takes its strength from its contrast to disloyalty dignity requires the possibility of humiliation and shame.