Organizational Culture

I. INTRODUCTION Individuals have relatively enduring and stable traits that help predict their attitudes and behaviors. Organizations also have personalities, which are referred to as “cultures.” Organizational cultures govern how that organization’s members behave.

II. ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE A. Defined. A system of shared meaning held by members that distinguishes the

organization from other organizations. There are seven primary characteristics that capture the essence of an organization's culture. These characteristics are measured on a scale of high to low and provide a composite picture of an organization's culture. This becomes the basis for the feelings of shared understanding that members have about the organization, how things are done in it, and the way members are supposed to behave.

1. Innovation and Risk Taking: The degree to which employees are encouraged to be innovative and take risks.

2. Attention to Detail: The degree to which employees are expected to exhibit precision, analysis, and attention to detail.

3. Outcome Orientation: The degree to which management focuses on results or outcomes rather than on the techniques and processes used to achieve those outcomes.

4. People Orientation: The degree to which management decisions take into consideration the effect of outcomes on people within the organization.

5. Team Orientation: The degree to which work activities are organized around teams rather than individuals.

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6. Aggressiveness: The degree to which people are aggressive and competitive rather than easy-going.

7. Stability: The degree to which organizational activities emphasize maintaining the status quo in contrast to growth.

B. Organizational Culture versus Job Satisfaction.

1. Organizational culture describes how employees perceive the characteristics of an organization’s culture, not whether or not they like those characteristics. It is a descriptive term.

2. Job satisfaction seeks to measure affective responses to the work environment. It is concerned with how employees feel about the organization. It is an evaluative term.

C. Layers of Organizational Culture. Culture is a system of shared meaning, therefore individuals of dissimilar backgrounds or at varying levels in the organization should describe the organization's culture in similar terms despite their differences. This doesn't mean however that an organization's culture is completely uniform.

1. Dominant Culture: This is the overall organizational culture as expressed by the core values held by the majority of the organization's members. When people are asked to portray an organization's culture, they normally describe the dominant culture: a macro view that gives an organization its distinct personality.

2. Subcultures: These subsets of the overall culture tend to develop in larger organizations to reflect the common problems, situations, or experiences that are unique to members of certain departments or geographical areas. The subculture retains the core values of the dominant culture but modifies them to reflect their own distinct situation.

D. Strong versus Weak Cultures. Strong cultures have a greater impact on employee behavior and are more directly related to reduced turnover.

1. Strong Culture: This exists when an organization's core values are both intensely held and widely shared. The greater the number of members who accept the core values and the greater their commitment to these values, the stronger the culture is. A strong culture creates an internal climate of high behavioral control and builds cohesiveness, loyalty, and organizational commitment.

2. Weak Culture: In this case, the organization's core values are not widely held or intensely felt. These cultures have little impact on member behavior.

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E. Organizational Culture versus National Culture. National culture has a greater impact on employee behavior than does an organization's culture. There may be self-selection biases during the hiring process whereby companies hire people most likely to fit into their organizational culture, rather than a person who more accurately reflects the national culture, which may make employees more likely to follow the organizational culture than a typical person from own national culture.

F. Functions and Liabilities of Organizational Culture.

1. The Functions of Organizational Culture: Overall, culture benefits organizations by increasing organizational commitment and the consistency of employee behavior. It also aids employees by reducing ambiguity. There are five basic functions of culture that help achieve these benefits:

a. Defines Boundaries: Culture creates distinctions between one organization and another.

b. Identity. Culture conveys a sense of identity for its members.

c. Commitment. Culture generates commitment to something that is larger than one's own self-interest.

d. Social Stability. Culture is the social glue that helps hold the organization together by providing appropriate standards for socially acceptable employee behavior.

e. Control Mechanism. Culture serves as a control mechanism that guides and shapes the attitudes and behavior of employees. It helps employees make sense of the work environment: it defines the rules of the game. In today's organizations, where direct and close managerial control appears to no longer be an option, culture is one of the ways to enforce organizational standards and to maintain effectiveness.

2. Culture as a Liability: Because culture is difficult to change in the short run and defines proper behavior, it may create barriers in the organization.

a. Barrier to Change: When the cultural values are not aligned with those that will increase an organization’s effectiveness in dynamic environments, they can create a barrier to implementing the necessary organizational changes.

b. Barrier to Diversity: There is a managerial conflict that exists because of culture. Organizations seek to hire people of diverse backgrounds in order to increase the quality of decision-making and creativity. But strong cultures, by their very nature, often seek to minimize diversity. Balancing the need for diversity with the need for a strong culture is an ongoing managerial challenge.

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c. Barrier to Acquisitions and Mergers One of the primary concerns in mergers and acquisitions in recent years has been the cultural compatibility between the joining firms as the main cause for the failure of these combinations has been cultural conflict.

III. CREATING AND SUSTAINING CULTURE

A. The Creation of Culture. The ultimate source of an organization's culture is its

founder(s). Founders have a vision of what the organization should be and they are unconstrained by previous customs or ideologies. The new organization's small size facilitates the founder’s imposition of his or her vision on all organizational members. Founders create culture in three ways:

1. Employees Selection: Founders hire and keep only those employees who think and feel the same way the founders do.

2. Socialization: Founders indoctrinate and socialize their employees toward the founders’ way of thinking and feeling.

3. Modeling: The founder acts as a role model and encourages to employees identify with him or her and to internalize the founder’s beliefs, values, and assumptions. Any organizational success is attributed to the founder’s vision, attitudes, and behavior. In a sense, the organization becomes an extension of the founder’s personality.

B. Sustaining Culture. Once a culture exists, OB practices within the organization serve to maintain it by giving employees a similar set of experiences. These practices include the selection process, performance evaluation criteria, training and development activities, and promotional procedures: those who support the culture are rewarded and those who do not are penalized.

1. Employee Selection: The selection process needs to identify potential employees with relevant skill sets; one of the more critical facets of this process is ensuring that those selected have values that are consistent with those of the organization. Employees whose values and beliefs are misaligned with those of the organization tend to not be hired, or self-select out of the applicant pool.

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2. Actions of Top Management: The verbal messages and actions of top management establish norms of behavior throughout the organization. These norms include the desirability of risk taking, level of employee empowerment, appropriate attire, and outlining successful career paths.

3. Employee Socialization: New employees must adapt to the organizational culture in a process called socialization. While socialization continues throughout an employee's career, the initial socialization is the most critical. There are three stages in this initial socialization. The success of this socialization will affect employee productivity, commitment, and turnover.

a. Prearrival: This encompasses all the learning that occurs before a new member joins the organization. Each individual arrives with his or her own unique set of values, attitudes, and expectations both surrounding the work and the organization. That knowledge, plus how proactive their personality is, are the two critical predictors of how well the new employees will adjust to the new culture.

b. Encounter: This is when the new employee sees what the organization is really like and confronts the possibility that expectations and reality may diverge. If the employee's expectations prove to be reasonably accurate, the encounter stage merely provides a reaffirmation of the perceptions gained earlier. But when expectations and reality differ, new employees must undergo socialization that will detach them from their previous assumptions and replace them with another set the organization deems desirable. At the extreme, a new member may become disillusioned with the actualities of the job and resign: an indication of the failure of the selection process. The greater the number of friendship ties a newcomer has in the organization, the more likely he or she is to be committed.

c. Metamorphosis. In this final stage, relatively long-lasting changes take place as the employee has adjusted to the work itself and internalized the workgroup’s values and norms. The more management relies on socialization programs that are formal, collective, fixed, serial, emphasize divestiture, the greater the likelihood that the newcomer’s differences and perspectives will be stripped away and replaced by standardized and predictable behaviors. Successful metamorphosis should have a positive effect on new employee productivity, organizational commitment, and turnover.

C. Culture Creation Model. Exhibit 15-3 provides a simple model of this cultural creation process. The original culture is derived from the founder's philosophy, which in turn strongly influences the criteria used in hiring. The actions of top management set the general climate of what is acceptable behavior. How well employees are socialized will depend on management’s selection of socialization method and the closeness of the new employees’ values to those of the organization.

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IV. HOW CULTURE IS LEARNED

A. Transmission. Culture is transmitted to employees in a number of forms: stories,

rituals, material symbols, and language.

1. Stories: Stories typically revolve around key events such as rule breaking, unlikely successes, workforce reductions, reactions to past mistakes, and methods of organizational coping that involve the organization's founders or other key personnel. These are morality tales: the stories are designed to teach lessons of how things should be done in the organization.

2. Rituals: These are repetitive sequences of activities that express and reinforce the key values of the organization. These rituals run the gambit from simple public “attaboys” to formal retirement ceremonies.

3. Material Symbols: Material symbols such as the size of offices, the elegance of furnishings, perquisites, awards and trophies, and the attire worn, all convey to employees who is important, the degree of egalitarianism desired by top management, and the kinds of appropriate behavior.

4. Language: Specialized languages, acronyms or jargon serve as a means to identify and segregate members of a culture or subculture. Once assimilated, the specialized language acts as a common denominator that unites members of a given culture or subculture

V. MANAGING CULTURAL CHANGE A. The Difficulty of Cultural Change: Culture is relatively stable and rooted in the

deeply held values to which employees are strongly committed. Culture is embedded in every aspect of the organization. While changing an organization's culture may be difficult, there are times when it is necessary. Four conditions indicate when the organizational environment is ripe for change:

1. A Dynamic Crisis Exists or Is Created: Crises such as a surprising financial setback, the loss of a major customer, or a dramatic technological breakthrough by a competitor may act as a shock that undermines the status quo and calls into question the relevance of the current culture. Some executives purposely create a crisis in order to stimulate cultural change.

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2. A Turnover in Leadership: Replacing top leadership with people from outside the organization can provide an alternative set of key values and is likely to increase the chances that new cultural values will be introduced.

3. Younger and Smaller Organizations: These organizations have less-entrenched cultures; their cultures are easier to change than are those of larger and better-established organizations.

4. Weaker Cultures: The stronger a culture of the more difficult it will be to change. Weak cultures are relatively easy to change.

B. Cultural Change Timeline. Even if these factors are favorable, cultural change is a lengthy process should be measured in years rather than months.

VI. CREATING AN ETHICAL ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

A. Favorable Conditions: A strong organizational culture that is high in risk tolerance, low-to-moderate in aggressiveness, and focuses on means as well as outcomes is the one most likely to shape high ethical standards.

B. Practices that Encourage Development of an Ethical Culture: Top management can:

1. Be a Visible Role Model: When senior management is seen as taking the ethical highroad, it provides a positive behavioral guideline for all employees.

2. Communicate Ethical Expectations: The creation and use of an organizational code of ethics helps reduce ethical ambiguities and enforce the organization's primary values.

3. Provide Ethical Training: Training acts to reinforce the organization’s standards of conduct, clarifies ethical practices, and addresses possible ethical dilemmas.

4. Visibly Reward Ethical Acts and Punish Unethical Ones: Performance appraisals must include the means taken to achieve goals as well as the ends themselves. Employees tend to act in ways that will gain them the greatest rewards (see Expectancy Theory in Chapter 5): tie ethical actions into the reward structure to modify behaviors.

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5. Provide Protective Mechanisms: Organizations must create formal mechanisms that allow employees to discuss ethical dilemmas or report unethical behavior without fear of reprimand (such as ethical counselors, ombudsman, or ethical officers) to facilitate the change to an ethical culture.

VII. CREATING A CUSTOMER-RESPONSIVE CULTURE

A. Purpose: Creating an organizational culture that builds a strong and loyal customer base is generally rewarded with revenue growth in better financial performance.

B. Key Variables in Shaping Customer-Responsive Cultures.

1. Type of Employees: Successful, service-oriented organizations hire employees who are outgoing and friendly.

2. Low Formalization: Service employees need to have the freedom to meet changing customer-service requirements. Rigid rules, procedures, and regulations make this difficult.

3. Widespread Use of Empowerment: Related to low formalization, employees need discretion to do what is necessary to please the customer.

4. Good Listening Skills: Employees must have the ability to listen and understand messages sent by the customer.

5. Role Clarity: Service employees act as “boundary spanners” between the organization and its customers. They have to please both management and customers, which may lead to role ambiguity and conflict, reducing job satisfaction and hindering performance. Managers should clarify employee roles as to the best way to perform the jobs and activities.

6. Organizational Citizenship Behavior: Employees should be conscientious in their desire to please the customer. They need to be able to take initiative to provide service beyond customer expectations.

C. Suggested Managerial Actions: To create a more customer-responsive culture, managers should do the following:

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1. Selection: Building a customer-responsive culture starts with hiring the correct service contact people.

Organizations should seek personalities and attitudes consistent with a high service orientation.

2. Training: Organizations with large numbers of existing employees should focus on training. The training should encompass improvement of product knowledge, active listening, showing patience, and displaying emotions.

3. Structural Design: Organizations that wish to become customer-oriented should reduce the numbers of rules and regulations so that employees are empowered to change their behavior to meet the needs and requests customers.

4. Empowerment: Employees should be given discretion to make day-to-day decisions about job-related activities. As with structural design, this allows customer service representatives to satisfy consumers completely and immediately.

5. Leadership: Leaders must model customer-centric behaviors if they wish their employees to act responsively toward their customers.

6. Performance Evaluation: Behavior-based performance evaluations are consistent with improved customer service. The focus of such appraisals is based of how employees behave or act (effort, commitment, teamwork, friendliness, and problem solving) rather than on measurable outcomes.

7. Reward Systems: Organizations that wish to deliver good service need to reward employees who provide it. Pay and promotions should be contingent on outstanding customer service.

VIII. CHARACTERISTIC OF ORGANIZATION CULTURE

Organizational culture is the set of important understandings, such as norms, values, attitudes, and beliefs, shared by organizational members. The essential core of organizational culture is system of shared meaning among members. Organizational

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climate has strong impact on the performance of the organization. It has basic elements of culture and they are artifacts, espoused values and basic assumptions. It is expressed in terms of norms, values, attitudes and beliefs shared by organizational members. Organizational culture has its key functions and they include sense of identity, enhancement of commitment and reinforcement of behavior.

The primary characteristics of an organizational culture are as follows: -

1. Innovation and Risk Taking: It can be described as the degree or extent to which employees are encouraged to take innovative steps and calculated risk.

2. Attention to Detail: It can be described as degree or extent to which employees are expected to pay attention to details.

3. Outcome Orientation: It can be described as the degree or extent to which management focuses outcome rather than on process to achieve outcome.

4. People Orientation: It can be described as the degree or extent to which management gives attention to effect of decisions on people working in the organization and on its shareholders.

5. Team Orientation: It can be described as the degree or extent to which works are organized around team rather than individuals.

6. Aggressiveness: It can be described as the degree or extent to which people are aggressive or competitive rather than unconcerned or relaxed.

7. Stability: It can be described as the degree or extent to which maintaining status quo is emphasized in contrast to growth.

8. Individual Autonomy: It can be described as the degree or extent of responsibility, independence, and opportunities for exercising initiative that individuals in an organization have.

9. Structure: It can be described as the degree or extent of rules and regulations and the amount of direct supervision that is used to supervise and control behavior.

10. Support: It can be described as the degree or extent of assistance and warmth managers provide for their subordinates.

11. Identity: It can be described as the degree or extent to which members identify with the organization as a whole rather than with their particular work group or field of professional expertise.

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12. Performance-Reward: It can be described as the degree or extent to which reward in the organization are based on employee work performance.

13. Conflict Tolerance: It can be described as the degree or extent of conflict present in relationships between peers and work groups as well as the motivation to be honest and open about differences.

14. Attitude towards Change: It can be described as the response given to new methods, ways, and values.

15. Focus: It can be described as the vision of the goals and objectives of an organization’s operations as communicated by those in control.

16. Standard and Values: The levels of performance and behavior considered to be acceptable by both types of criteria – formal and informal.

17. Rituals: It can be described as the expressive events that support and reinforce organizational standards and values;

18. Openness, Communication, and Supervision: It can be described as the amount and type of interchange permitted. The communication flow can be downward, upward, across the organization, and in other directions as spelled out by the culture.

19. Market and Customer Orientation: It can be described as the degree or extent to which the organization is responsive to its markets and customers. 20. Excitement, Pride, and esprit de corps: It can be described as a perceptibly good feeling about the organization and its activities.

21. Commitment: It can be described as the degree or extent to which individuals are willingly working towards goals on a long-lasting basis.

IX. EFFECTIVE WAY TO BUILD AND MAINTAIN A POSITIVE ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

An organizational culture can be defined in many ways. According to Edgar Schein it is, ‘The deeper level of basic assumptions and beliefs that are: learned responses to the

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group's problems of survival in its external environment and its problems of internal integration; are shared by members of an organization; that operate unconsciously; and that define in a basic "taken -for-granted" fashion in an organization's view of itself and its environment.’ Many people say that a positive culture is essential for a business organization to thrive in the market. Different organizations follow different kinds of methods and depend on varied resources to get their job done. Whichever way the organization chooses to get the job done, it should impact the employees in a positive way. There is no denying that a positive organizational culture contributes a lot to the overall efficiency of the organization. Today, we see companies whose employee’s lackluster performance affecting the output of the company.

The task of creating a positive wave in the organization is mostly the responsibility of the leaders in the organization. The managers and top level officials at the company should be involved in matters outside management functions. They should take some steps forward to the employees to motivate the employees. A good organizational culture only motivates the employees to give their best towards their productivity. It is a sad fact that there are also organizational cultures which prove destructive to the organization. Setting realistic and quantifiable goals and motivating the employees towards reaching them is a productive and positive culture. For motivating the employees, the leaders and managers have to understand the needs of employees and work towards meeting them.

As part of the positive culture that some organizations follow, instances can be found where the employees and management indulge in an open communication. This, however, is not a possibility in every organization or a practical method. If some method like this can be implemented in any organization, it will do only good for the company and organizational culture. Holding monthly or occasional meetings involving all or most of the staff is something which can be implemented. The meeting should be made casual, if possible, and any official differences should be kept apart. Sending communications through emails to the employees which ask for their views and opinions, an open door policy for managers etc are all efficient methods. Employees should be given the feel where the managers are always approachable and you can take your concerns to them.

In most of the companies, the top level management tends to hide critical company information with the most important part of the organization, the employees. For other organizations, transparency is a big part in their culture’s success stories. Every employee would be eager to know what is happening in their company and if the company management is reluctant to share the information, it will only affect the morale of the employees negatively. For employees working in most organizations, experience has been bad when something wrong happens from their part. Employees will be taunted again and again by the managers and fellow employees regarding the mistake. However, if the employee does something extremely beneficial for the company, the effort and accomplishment goes unnoticed and unappreciated. In a positive work culture, the accomplishments needs to be appreciated and mistakes corrected without hurting the emotions. However, this could not be possible all the time.

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Like the way it is important to develop satisfaction and culture at individual level, it is also important to implement the methodologies at the team level. Within a team of employees, it is important to develop interdependence because no single employee can alone lift an organization or company to the greatest heights. There should be enough level of trust among the team members and the environment needs to be motivating. Better management and productivity can be achieved if proper goals are set for the teams. Every member of a team must understand the relevance of that team and his role in the team. A good system should also be in place to track all the actions.

In any organization, the management and top leaders are responsible for maintaining a good organizational culture while the employees are the ones who carry the legacy over. The culture at the organization will definitely impact the productivity and efficiency of the organization. In the culture that a company follows, it is the leaders who decide what all needs to remain unchanged and which parts require changes. They have the power to transform the culture of an organization for good or bad. Implementing good culture in an organization is a time consuming process and everyone has to be patient enough to accept the changes. However, once accepted it will definitely do good to both the employees as well as the organization as a whole.

X. SPIRITUALITY AND ORGANIZATIONAL CULTUREWorkplace spirituality is not about organized religious practices. It’s not about God or theology. 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. Organizations that promote a spiritual cultural recognize that people have both a mind and a spirit, seek to find meaning and purpose in their work, and desire to connect with other human beings and be part of a community.

Historical models of management and organizational behavior had no room for spirituality. The myth of rationality assumed that the well-run organization eliminated feelings. Similarly, concern about an employee’s inner life had no role in the perfectly rational model. But just as we’ve now come to realize that the study of emotions improve our understanding of organizational behavior, an awareness of spirituality can help you to better understand employee behavior in the twenty first century.

What do Southwest Airlines, Hewlett-Packard, The Men’s Warehouse, AES, Wetherill Associates and Tom’s of Maine have in common? They’re among a growing number of organizations that have embraced workplace spirituality.

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Of course, employees have always had an inner life. So why has the search for meaning and purposefulness in work surfaced now? There are a number of reasons.

The concept of workplace spirituality draws on our previous discussions of topics such as values, ethics, motivation, leadership, and work/life balance. As you’ll see, for instance, spiritual organizations are concerned with helping people develop and reach their full potential. Similarly organizations that are concerned with spirituality are more likely to directly address problems created by work/life conflicts.

What differentiates spiritual organizations from their non-spiritual counterparts? Although research on this question is only preliminary, our review identified five cultural characteristics that tend to be evident is spiritual organizations.

Strong Sense of Purpose: Spiritual organizations build their cultures around a meaningful purpose. While profits may be important, they’re not the primary values of the organization. Maximizing profits may excite investors but it rarely stirs employees’ emotions or imaginations. People want to be inspired by a purpose that they believe is important and worthwhile. Southwest Airlines, for instance, is strongly committed to providing the lowest airfares, on-time services, and a pleasant experience for customer. Tom’s of Maine strives to sell personal care household products that are made from natural ingredients and are environmentally friendly. AES, the world’s largest independent power producer, seeks to provide electricity around the globe and to fundamentally change people’s lives and their economic well-being.

XI. WORK CULTURE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN INDIA AND US

A very strong culture difference which I noticed was that Indian co-workers within a very short period of time would have fully become acquainted with all of your personal details: Your native place, religion, languages spoken, and educational qualifications, work experience, relationship status, property owned and so on. Within a day or two of joining the office, your entire floor would have known your full personal details. On the contrary, it would be very surprising if you knew the names of all of your US co-workers sitting around your cubicle.

Indian co-workers are very social and very quickly become friendly. They go together for lunch, hang out together after office hours, meet each other during the weekends and visit

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each other’s house during various festivals. The relationship with ones colleague extends much beyond the professional relation and many times the personal binding is stronger than the professional binding. In US, apart from the regular "Hello, How are you doing" greetings in the office, I have hardly observed any worker hanging out with his colleague for a lunch or for a weekend outing.

The third major difference which I have observed has been the topic selected to discuss for non-work related conversation. Whereas in US, the discussion is mostly restricted to weather, in India, a wide range of topics ranging from politics, sports, movie gossip, to your colleagues new affair are discussed.

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