Primary embedding mechanisms
The six primary embedding mechanisms are the
major “tools” that leaders have available to them
to teach their organisation how to perceive,
think, feel, and behave based on their own
conscious and unconscious convictions. These six
mechanisms are:
1. What leaders pay attention to,
measure, and control on a regular
basis → one of the best ways for leaders
to communicate what they believe in or
care about is what they systematically pay attention to. Here it is the consistency that is
important, not the intensity of the attention. This might sound abstract, so here is an
example: suppose you are a manager, you value safety, and you want to convey the
importance of safety down to your employees. An idea could be that you insist that the
first item in every meeting will be a discussion of safety issues. If this is done on a daily
or weekly basis, employees will start asking questions about safety issues themselves,
just because there is now paid sufficient attention to.
Another powerful tool is visible emotional reaction, especially when leaders feel that
one of their values is being violated. Normally you would say that as a manager, allowing
your emotions to become too involved in decision-making processes is not a good thing.
However, employees experience their leader’s emotional outbursts as painful and try
to avoid them, hence a powerful way of controlling the behaviour of employees.
What absolutely doesn’t work is leaders showing inconsistent behaviour. This creates
confusion among subordinates about what message the leader wants to convey. Mostly,
the leader is not even aware of this conflicting behaviour.
2. Leader reactions to critical incidents and organisational crises → the way that
leaders deal with an organisational crisis reveals important underlying assumptions,
and creates new norms, values, and procedures. Crises heighten anxiety and reducing
that anxiety is a good motivator for learning. Therefore, in times of crisis, employees are
more likely to remember what leaders say in order to learn.
3. How leaders allocate resources → how budgets are created in an organisation reveals
leader assumptions and beliefs. Their beliefs about their organisation’s competence,
acceptable levels of financial crisis, and the degree to which the organisation is
financially independent, influence their choices on goals setting and the means to
achieve those goals. For example, a leader who highly values financial independence will
not support to loan a lot of money, which can lead to missing potentially good
investments.
4. Deliberate role modelling, teaching, and coaching → another great way to
communicate assumptions and values is by showing it yourself as a leader. Especially for
newcomers, showing your own visible behaviour causes them to see you as a role model
and will follow your example.
5. How leaders allocate rewards and status → this could range from a conversation
about what the organisation values and what the desired behaviours are to direct
rewarding and punishing behaviour. In short, when a leader values safety, make clear
that safety behaviour will be rewarded (and/or unsafe behaviour is punished), and
reward/punish consistent with that behaviour.
6. How leaders select, promote, and excommunicate → this is also a very subtle but
effective way to embed leader values. By hiring new members, leaders can select
members who resemble present employees in style, assumptions, values, and beliefs.
Secondary reinforcement and stabilizing mechanisms
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,Next, there are secondary mechanisms that can
reinforce leader value embedding, only when they
are consistent with the primary mechanisms
described above. When they are inconsistent, they
will be either be ignored or be a source of internal
conflict. Internal conflict will lead to subcultures
that are not in line with the overall organisational
culture.
• Organisational design and structure → the early design of an organisation reveals a
leader’s assumptions about internal relationships and about theories of how things must
be done derived from the leader’s own background. However, these views are often
mixed with the requirements of the primary task, which is how to organise to survive in
the external environment. An example is a leader who hires his own friends and
relatives in a family business while the environment asks for experts and talents.
• Organisation systems and procedures → the most visible parts in an organisation
involve the daily routines, procedures, and other recurrent tasks. These stable systems
and procedure function as a means to provide predictability and reduce ambiguity and
anxiety. Note: systems and procedures formalize the process of “paying attention”, thus
reinforcing the message that the leader cares about certain things.
• Rites and rituals of the organisation → rites and rituals can be seen as the deciphering
of cultural assumptions of the leader. It is not always easy to translate those rituals to
leader assumptions, so therefore it is not a primary mechanism of embedding culture.
• Design of physical space, facades, and buildings → the physical design includes all
visible features of the organisation that customers, investors, new employees, and
visitors would encounter. Messages can be inferred from this physical design (e.g. if the
leader values an informal culture, they could include couches to work on or introduce an
office dog). However, physical elements also reflect macro cultures, the assumptions of
architects themselves, or assumptions of facility managers.
• Stories about important events and people → stories can be used to teach important
values to newcomers. However, leaders do not control what stories will be told about
them, so they can also backfire if the stories reflect a leader’s inconsistent behaviour.
Next to this, stories can often be vague so it may be difficult to extract the underlying
assumptions.
• Formal statements of organisational philosophy, creeds, and charters → this is the
most simple form of conveying a message and simply involves explicitly stating what the
leader’s values and assumptions are. Introducing formal statements can be crucial for
articulating the identity that the organisation wants to convey to its investors,
customers, and employees, but it cannot be viewed as a way of defining the
organisation’s whole culture.
Lecture 6
We have a founder who has an idea.
They bring together a group of different
people and tries to convince them to
join their cause. In the beginning this is
a group of very different people. The
group is not (yet) cohesive and not
(yet) ready to perform. The group of
people has to go through 4 different
stages (forming, storming, norming
performing) after which they will
become cohesive and ready to perform.
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, Because the life of an organization isn’t easy, the group faces issues of external
adaptation and internal integration. They need to reach certain agreements with
regards to how they will organize themselves with regards to survival. After this the
group is ready to work on achieving organizational goals.
Week 7
Readings for week 7
Schein & Schein – Chapter 14
Why use typologies, and why not?
New concepts (e.g. meaning of words, description of situations, etc.) are learned by our culture.
Cultures allow us to discriminate and label what we experience, and to translate that into a
common language so that those experiences can be shared. New concepts become useful if they:
1) help to make sense and out of the observed phenomena, 2) help to define what may be the
underlying structure in the phenomena by building a theory of how things work, which, in turn,
3) enables us to predict to some degree how other phenomena that may not yet have been
observed will look and act. Those labels that we create, we can call typologies. Three dangers of
typologies are:
1. Abstract or oversimplified → typologies can be so abstract that they don’t give an
adequate reflection of reality anymore. Also, they can be so simple, which causes us to
oversimplify relevant details that are in fact more complicated.
2. Narrow our attention span → typologies simplify the daily work of making sense of our
experiences. However, this causes us to narrow our attention span and become more
mindless when we are observing our environment.
3. How we derive at them → there is also the question of how we arrive at the abstract
labels. We often forget how we’ve learned most of the concepts that we know.
Some issues in the measurement of typologies (through surveys) are:
• Extremely broad concepts (e.g. culture) would need an impossible amount of questions
to cover all elements, so often the problem is, what to ask and what not to ask?
• Employees may not be motivated to be honest.
• Employees may not understand the questions or may interpret them differently.
• What is measured may be accurate but superficial.
• The sample of employees who are surveyed may not be representative of the key culture
group.
• The profile of dimensions does not reveal interactions or patterns into a total system.
• Taking the survey itself can have undesirable consequences.
However, some useful functions of these surveys are:
• Determining whether particular dimensions of culture are related to performance.
• Giving an organisation a profile of itself to stimulate a deeper analysis of their culture.
• Comparinag organisations with each other on selected dimensions as preparation for
mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures.
• Testing for subculture differences.
• Educating employees about important dimensions that managers want to work on.
Typologies that focus on assumptions about authority and intimacy
The basic relationship between the employee and the organisation is a fundamental cultural
dimension because it contains assumptions about authority and intimacy. According to Etzioni,
there are three types of organisations:
1. Coercive organisations → the individual is captivated by the organisation and must
obey all rules that authorities propose (e.g. prisons, military academies, etc.). These
organisations usually evolve strong countercultures as a defence against the authority.
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