Chapter 7 Flashcards
Organisational culture
Organisational culture is the taken-for-granted assumptions and behaviours of an organisations members.
How can culture be the basis of competitive advantage?
Culture can provide organisations with hard-to-imitate knowledge about how to do things distinctively and well: in this sense, organisational culture is potentially a basis for competitive advantage.
Historical continuity
Refers to change that is steady and small relative origins. Often exploiting historical strenghts.
Historical selection
Refers to historical influence on culture that is deliberately selective with regard to the past. Past is only partially incorporated into the present strategy. History is a resource that can be drawn upon in pieces, with gaps being filled as required.
What are the four kinds of relationships between the past and current organisational cultures?
Historical continuity, historical selection, historical rupture and historical rediscovery.
Historical rupture
Radical culture changes with little similarities with history. This kind of historical rupture is typically emphasised by managers dealing with crisis.
Historical rediscovery
Another form of change is that which rediscovers the old culture, or atleast parts of it. Often comes after some kind of strategic failure. Organisation attempts to rediscover valuable elements of the old culture that underpinned the initial success.
Geographical influences
Culture is different depending on geographies, national or regional. Germanic cultures tend towards individualism, while Latin culture are more collectivist.
Field influences
An organisational field is a community of organisations that interact more frequently with one another than with those outside the field and that have developed a shared culture.
In the organisational field of pharmaceuticals all actors share a commitment to the ideal that health is a good thing and worth striving for.
Categorisation: The ways in which members of an organisational field categorise themselves and their activities have significant implications for what they do.
Recipes: Because of their shared cultures, organisational fields tend to cohere around standard waus of doing thing.
Legitimacy: Is concerned with meeting the expectations within an organisational field in terms of assumptions, behaviours and strategies.
Explain the four layers of organisational culture
The inner circle is the paradigm (i.e. the taken-for-granted assumptions). Thereafter comes the behaviours, which are the day-to-day ways in which an organisation operates. Thereafter comes the beliefs, which are more specific, could be a belief that the organisation should not trade with particular countries. The outer layer are the values that can be easily identified in terms of those formally stated, however the actual values are often depicted in the action that is the behaviours in the organisation. And many organisation has been accused of hypocrisy such as Blackrock who declares commitment to divest from the coal industry but still has companies in their portfolios that are extensively coal related.
The cultural web
The cultural web shows the behavioural, physical and symbolic manifestations of a culture and includes:
The paradigm, rituals and routines, stories, symbols, power, organisational structures, control systems.
Important factors to consider when undertaking a cultural analysis
Questions to ask: What core beliefs do stories reflect? What are the formal and informal structures? etc.
Statements of cultural values: Organisations may make public statements of their values, beliefs and purposes, for example in annual reports, mission or value statements. Likely to be at best only partially true, following a narrative.
Pulling it together: The detail map produced by “the cultural web” can be a rich source of information but it is useful to integrate the elements into a summary.
Organisational identity
Refers to how organisations express and project a sense of organisational self: a claim about ´who we are´.
Strategic drift
Strategic drift is the tendency for strategies to develop incrementally on the basis of cultural influences, failing to keep pace with a changing environment.
With strategic drift, strategy emerges from the unconscious biases of the organisations existing culture, reinforcing inertia.
