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College aantekeningen Organizational Culture and Change
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Hoorcollege 1 - Organizational Culture and Change - 08-11-2023Culture: Shared values and norms, it is not individual. Culture can be a lot of different things:
● Consumer culture: things we use and integrate in our personal lives.
● Geography
● Interest in a typical kind of music or something.
Origin of the term:
- From the Latin word colere = to till the ground/ to grow
- Cultus (past participle) = cultivated/ nurtured/ cared fo
- An agricultural term; something you develop, grow, nurture.
- Culture is a fuzzy concept:
- Culture is studied across many disciplines.
- Enormous variation in the definition of the term.
- The concept is used to cover everything and nothing.
- It stands for something and can be interpreted in many different ways.
- It is a very broad concept. Different disciplines focus on different aspects of
culture:
- Organization Science: organizational culture and subcultures.
Organizational culture:
● Leadership -> has a huge influence on culture.
○ Also has a big influence on the work experience of coworkers for example.
○ Organizational culture is very important for your work experience, it is even
more important than your tasks are. The leader has a big role in this.
Shared assumptions about organizational culture:
1. Related to history / tradition.
2. Collectively shared by members of a group
3. To do with meanings, understandings, beliefs
4. Some depth
5. Difficult to grasp and must be interpreted
6. Emotional rather than strictly rational.
7. Helps to understand richness of organizational life
- Collectively shared understanding. It goes beyond the surface which makes it difficult to
capture.
- Culture is broadly seen as a shared and learned world of experiences, meanings, values
and understandings which are expressed and reproduced partly in symbolic form.
Most significant concepts of organizational culture:
- Symbols:
- Words, actions, material items that stand for something else.
- Rich in meaning - calls for interpretation.
- Collective (vs. private) symbolism of interest.
- If it is not collectively decided, it doesn't have meaning.
- Something that stands for something else. It is strong and there is a shared
understanding.
, - Because we understand them collectively, they have meaning.
- Meanings:
- How an object or utterance is interpreted.
- Makes interpretation more homogeneous.
- Socially shared meanings are of interest.
Culture as social and taken-for-granted:
● Culture is “done” without anyone really thinking about it.
● Not ‘inside’ people’s heads, but ‘between’ people.
● It is not fixed, but situationally adaptive.
● Shared interpretations reduce uncertainties.
● Riding a car in another country: ride like everyone else does. People expect a certain
behavior, and act like this.
○ People need to understand social patterns of behavior.
Call for analytical depth -> !! Warning!! -> Often ‘culture’ refers to little more than a
social pattern/ surface phenomena
-> There is a need to dig deeper
Edgar Schein’s Model of Organizational Culture:
-
- Only a small fraction of our behavior is something that we are aware of, and the most of
our behavior is driven by things underneath the surface.
Why do people study organizational culture?
● 1980’s -> US industry was facing a crisis. People didn't understand what was happening,
because at the same time, the Japanese industry was booming.
○ The answer to why there was a difference in those two industries, was ‘culture’.
○ The focus on shared values, commitment and high-quality output in the Japanese
companies caused success.
● Pop-management authors / consultants suggested that Western countries learn the “art
of Japanese Management”.
○ “Culture of excellence”
● Organizational culture -> a way to make sure that people are committed to a certain
organization.
○ The relevance in practice arises.
● Shift from mass production to the service and knowledge economy (remote ‘brain work’
more difficult to control)
,Three interests for studying a phenomenon: Why study organizational culture?
1. The technical interest -> most dominant.
● Try to use culture in order to improve the efficiency and performance of an
organization.
● Control organizational culture.
● Improve organizational performance and effectiveness.
2. The practical hermeneutic interest:
● Trying to understand what is going on, the work of anthropologists for example.
● Understand how shared meaning is created in organizational communities.
3. The emancipatory interest:
● Targets taken-for granted beliefs and instrumentality.
● Not interested in profitability of an organization, but if there is any harm on
employees.
○ Not interested in dis-advantages for organizations, but for employees.
-
How to study organizational culture:
- Not something you can easily take in measure.
- Culture can be anything and nothing. It depends on the meanings people give it.
- Culture: complex, inaccessible, fuzzy phenomena.
- Alvesson suggests: balance between rigor/ flexibility.
- Rigor: Be focused and precise, analyze specific cultural phenomena, seek interpretive
depth, examine motives and objectives.
- Flexibility: No formula or model for studying culture, causal links lead to
oversimplification.
- Requires careful reflection of one’s own cultural bias.
Alvesson: culture is not something that can be oversimplified. It is difficult.
Observing the day-to-day functioning of an organization:
● Patterns of interaction between individuals and groups.
● (Variations in) language used.
● Topics and questions explored in conversations.
● Various habits and rituals of daily routine.
● The longer you stay in a place, the less you see the differences, because some things
become normal.
, Organizational culture at the university:
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