Creating A New Culture

Defining Organisational Culture

Recent research suggests that there are ten primary characteristics that, in aggregate, capture the essence of an organisation’s culture:

Member Identity: The degree to which employees identify with the organisation rather than with their type of job or field of professional expertise.

Group Emphasis: The degree to which work activities are organised around groups, rather than individuals.

People Focus: The degree to which management decisions take into consideration the effect of outcomes on people within the organisation.

Unit Integration: The degree to which units within the organisation are encouraged to operate in a coordinated/interdependent manner.

Control: The degree to which rules, regulations, and direct supervision are used to oversee and control employee behaviour.

Risk Tolerance: The degree to which employees are encouraged to be aggressive, innovative, and risk-seeking.

Reward Criteria: The degree to which rewards such as salary increases, and promotions are allocated according to employee performance rather than seniority, favouritism, or other non-performance factors.

Conflict Tolerance: The degree to which employees are encouraged to air conflicts and criticisms openly.

Means-End Orientation: The degree to which management focuses on results/outcomes rather than on the techniques and processes and to achieve those outcomes.

Open-System Focus: The degree to which the organisation monitors and responds to changes in the external environment.

Implicit vs. Explicit Culture

Some writers distinguish between the explicit culture, by which they mean the typical and distinctive patterns of behaviour of a people and the typical and distinctive artefacts they produce (artefacts include buildings, art, literature, and so on), and the implicit culture, which refers to the total set of cultural beliefs, values, norms and premises which underlie and determine the observed regularities in behaviour making up the explicit culture.

Dominant vs. Sub-Culture

Organisational culture represents a common perception held by the organisation’s members. This was made explicit when we defined culture as a system of shared meaning. We should expect, therefore, that individuals with different backgrounds or at different levels in the organisation will tend to describe the organisation’s culture in similar terms.

Acknowledgement that organisational culture has common properties does not mean, however, that there cannot be subcultures within any given culture. Most large organisations have a dominant culture and numerous sets of subcultures.

A dominant culture expresses the core values that are shared by most of the organisation’s members. When we talk about an organisation’s culture, we are referring to its dominant culture. It is the macro view of culture that gives an organisation its distinct personality. Subcultures tend to develop in large organisations to reflect common problems, situations, or experiences that members face. These subcultures are likely to be defined by department designations and geographical separation. The purchasing department, for example, can have a subculture that is unique; shared by members of that department. It will include the core values of the dominant culture plus additional values unique to members of the purchasing department. Similarly, an office or unit of the organisation that are physically separated from the organisation’s main operations may take on a different personality. Again, the core values are essentially retained but modified to reflect the separated unit’s distinct situation.

If organisations had no dominant culture and were composed of only numerous subcultures, then the values of the organisational culture, as an independent variable, would be significantly lessened because there would be no uniform interpretation of what represented appropriate and inappropriate behaviour. It is the “shared meaning” aspect of culture that makes it such a potent device for guiding and shaping behaviour. But, we cannot ignore the reality that many organisations also have subcultures that can influence behaviour of members.