Q: Organizational culture and change

The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, once said: “<a href="https://softwaredominos.com/home/business-management-articles/operational-excellence-in-7-quotes-from-its-founding-fathers/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">change is the only constant</a>”. This applies equally well to organizational culture. New members coming in, old leaders moving out, new threats, and new challenges are all part of the natural forces that compel <a href="https://softwaredominos.com/home/business-management-articles/cultural-transformations-and-resistance-to-change-understanding-the-risks-to-your-organizations-growth/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">organizations to change</a>.

Question 1

What is organizational culture?

Accepted Answer

Organizational culture is a set of hidden rules and assumptions that govern the behavior of an organization.

These rules and assumptions allow the organization to respond to external pressures (such as competition) and internal integration pressures (like dealing with conflict).

An influential model of organizational culture is the one developed by Edgar Schein.

Question 2

What is organizational culture change?

Accepted Answer

If an organization faces existential threats, it might need to change its culture. This is also known as organizational cultural transformation. These are usually painful and can either lead to the survival of the organization or its decline and fall.

Question 3

How does leadership impact organizational culture?

Accepted Answer

Leadership influences organizational culture at every stage of its lifetime.

Organizational culture emerges and develops based on the actions/responses of the founding fathers during the early stages of the organization's life. These initial responses are then confirmed by subsequent events and become assumptions that are rarely questioned.

During the organization's midlife, leadership maintains the existing culture by influencing and managing the integration of new members and replacing those who moved on.

In times of crisis, transformation leaders are brought from outside the organization to manage the change. Outsiders are not emotionally attached to the existing cultures and are ready to drive the changes through the turmoil.

Question 4

What is organizational behavior?

Accepted Answer

Organizational behavior is defined by the organization's response to both internal and external challenges.

The way it deals with integration issues, like conflict and challenges to its leadership and external issues such as competition, changing customer requirements, disruptive technologies, determine an organization's behavior.

Question 5

Organizational culture and change

Accepted Answer

The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, once said: “change is the only constant”. This applies equally well to organizational culture.

New members coming in, old leaders moving out, new threats, and new challenges are all part of the natural forces that compel organizations to change.

Question 6

What are examples of organizational culture?

Accepted Answer

Two examples of organizational culture (derived from Edgar Schein's book on organizational culture and leadership) are as follows.

Organization A believes in internal competition, prefers centralized control, and trusts that responsible people with good will can solve problems.

Organization B believes in individualism, truth through conflict, personal initiatives, creativity, innovation, and individual responsibility.

Question 7

What is the theory of organizational culture?

Accepted Answer

Edgar Schein developed one of the interesting theories on organizational culture.

His idea is based on the assumption that a group of people working towards a specific objective over a shared history will develop shared knowledge (which he refers to as assumptions).

These assumptions govern all aspects of the group's interactions. These are rules dictating the inclusion or exclusion criteria from the group, agreement on the nature of time and space, development of intimacy, love, and affection, distribution of power and status, rewards and punishments, and finally managing the unmanageable (such as religion and politics).

Question 8

Organizational culture model

Accepted Answer

One particular model of organizational culture was proposed by Edgar Schein in his 1990 paper on the topic.

Schein proposes a model built around a group that has shared a sufficiently long and shared history. Their common experience in the face of internal and external threats and under the influence of their leaders allowed them to form some assumptions and gather around specific values. These assumptions and values manifest themselves through observed artifacts (such as office setup) and subtle behaviours such as dealing with internal conflict.

Question 9

Why is organizational culture important?

Accepted Answer

Organizational culture is the invisible hand that governs the behaviour of a particular group, in this case, either the organization as a whole or its subgroups.

Organizational culture is responsible for two aspects of an organization's dynamics, both of which are vital to the performance and even survival of the organization.

The first is maintaining the cohesion of the group in the face of internal pressure. The dominant culture governs the inculturation of new members, management of conflict, allocation of status and power, and distribution of rewards and punishments.

Another aspect of an organization's culture dynamics is surviving external threats and staying in the game. Organizational culture is thriving if it allows its regeneration and renewal through transformation. This capability will enable it to adapt and survive disruptive changes in its environment.

Question 10

How organizational culture impacts individual and organizational performance

Accepted Answer

Cultural clashes 43% and General organizational resistance to change 42% have been repeatedly cited in the State of Agile Report as the top detractors from Agile adoption by participating organizations.

The State of DevOps Report also showed the same signs despite the proven benefits of both methodologies.

Individuals can show resistance for several reasons, especially if it adversely impacts their current status and privileges and challenges the concepts that placed them where they are.

The traumatic and anxiety-ridden experiences that it has to go through while it unlearns its previous assumptions and learns new ones can explain organizational resistance to change.

Question 11

What is positive organizational culture?

Accepted Answer

Organizational culture is a cognitive construct that allows groups trying to achieve a common objective to cope with internal and external pressures.

In this manner, it is neither positive nor negative. It can be viewed as a tool for dealing with the challenges posed by the environment.

Perhaps a better adjective for organizational culture might be healthy vs toxic. A healthy culture allows the group to grow, perform, and more crucially, survive disruptive changes.

A toxic organizational culture stifles growth, impedes progress, and endangers people's morale and mental wellbeing.

From Edgar Schein's book: "Whether or not a culture is 'good' or 'bad', 'functionally effective' or not, depends not on the culture alone, but on the relationship of the culture to the environment in which it exists."

Question 12

What is a strong organizational culture?

Accepted Answer

The strength of an organizational culture derives from how strong its values and assumptions are held by its members.

This in turn derives from two factors:

A) How traumatic were the experiences from which the culture emerged
B) How much anxiety-reduction capabilities it holds
B) The dominant personalities of its founders

Quoting Edgar Schein from his book on Organizational Culture and Leadership: "If a basic assumption comes to be strongly held in a group, members will find behavior based on any other premise inconceivable".

Question 13

What are the characteristics of organizational culture?

Accepted Answer

The characteristics (or levels) of organizational culture in Schein's model are:

A) Artifacts
B) Espoused Beliefs and Values
C) Underlying Assumptions

The Artifacts encompass the visible organizational structures and processes. These could be the office's layout or whether a high or low voice is used for communications. Artifacts usually are hard to explain without additional knowledge.

Espoused beliefs and values are the strategies, goals, philosophies (or espoused justifications that allow members of the organization to make sense of why they are doing things in a certain way).

Finally, the underlying assumptions are the unconscious thoughts, feelings, and axioms that motivate the group's behavior.

Question 14

Managing Cultural Transformations

Accepted Answer

A successful management of cultural transformations will depend on three factors:

A) Cultural transformations cannot kick-off without enough data made available and which indicates that changes in the environment have occurred, and that these changes jeopardize the strategic goals of the organization.

B) The organization needs to have enough psychological safety to recognize the possibility of a successful transformation without having to compromise its image and reputation.

C) Change Managers or Transformational Leaders, possibly from outside the organization, are likely to be needed to carry the change over as they will not have the same trouble unlearning some of the, now sacred, assumptions on which the culture was built.

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