Chapter 7 - Culture and strategy Flashcards
Organisational culture
Is the taken-for-granted assumptions and behaviours of an organisation’s members
* Culture’s influence penetrates deep within organisations
* Culture hellps to define the strategy of the organisation
Historical Continuity
- Organisational cultures often become deeply entrenched. New recruits are attracted by particular cultural features and employees reproduce them over time. Leaders who have come up through the organisation tend to support the culture that produced them.
- Represented by a continuous line, sloping gently from the organisation’s original culture, some movement as the organisational culture adapts to a changing environment, but change is steady and small.
- Historical continuity as a distinctive strength: ‘Our competitors do not have a history they can use as we do.’
Historical Selection
Deliberate selectivity with regard to the past. History is a resource that can be drawn upon in pieces, giving the culture legitimate roots but without the risk of being trapped in nostalgia. The reslut can be relatively change.
Historcal rupture
Sometimes organisations attempt radical cultural change, making a wholesale rupture with their past.
* Rupture is typically emphasised by managers dealing with crisis.
Historical rediscovery
Rediscovers the old culture, ir at least parts of it. Such discovery often comes after some kind of strategic failure. This approach is about turning back rather than justifying the new. Two key forms of historical analysis:
* Chronological analysis - Involber setting down a chronology of key events in the organisation’s history. Valuable to identify key events that are seens as turning points
* Historical storytelling How do people tell their organisation’s history? - Websites etc.
Geographical influences
Attitudes to work, people, the long-term and other important factors vary in different geographies, national or regional - by history, religion and climate.
Field influences
An organisational field is a community of organisations (including regulators, professional bodies, university researchers, specialist media and even campaign groups) that interact more frequently with one another than with those outside the field and that have developed a shared culture.
Organisational culture
How culture influences strategy. Organisational culture is composed by multiple elements, such as; Values, Beliefs, Behaviours and Taken-for-granted assumptions (paradigm)
Paradigm
The set of taken-for-granted assumptions which is the core of an organisation’s culture.
Shared assumptions concern fundamental aspects of the organisation that guide people in that organisation about how to view and respond to different circumstances that they face.
Cultural web
The cultural web shows the behavioural, physical and symbolic manifestations of a culture that inform and are informed by the taken-for-granted assumptions, or paradigm, of an organisation.
The seven elements of the cultural web are:
1. Paradigm. At the core, the set of assumptions held in common and taken for granted in an organisation.
2. Rituals and routines. the repetitive nature of organisational cultures.
3. Stories. Embeds the present in its organisational history and flags up important events and personalities.
4. Symbols. Are objects, events, acts or people that convey, maintain or create meaning over and above their functional purpose.
5. Power Structure. The ability of individuals or groups to persuade, induce or coerce others into following certain courses of action.
6. Organisational structure. Are the roles, responsibilities and reporting relationships in organisations. These are likely to reflect power structures and how they manifest themselves.
7. Control systems. Are the formal and informal ways of monitoring and supporting people within and around an organisation and tend to emphasise what is seen to be important in the organisation.
Organisational identity
Refers to how organisations express and project a sense of organisational self: a claim about “who we are”
Strategic drift
the tendency for strategies to develop incrementally on the basis of cultural influences, failing to keep pace with a changing environment.
