OT- W4 Flashcards
What is culture?
The meanings and understandings that groups of people share together, which are learned
habitually.
Describe Edgar Schein’s theory on organizational culture
Culture is something that is largely subconscious. Schein distinguishes three levels of culture:
1. Surface structures (artefacts): visible forms, artefacts, symbols and behaviors.
2. Espoused values: values, norms and attitudes which are not always visible. For example, how people talk about an organization, visions, and objectives.
3. Basic assumptions:cultural values and deeply underlying assumptions, usually subconscious. This level is hard to observe and even harder to change. The basic assumptions are often not explicitly communicated and are therefore often taken for
granted by the organizational members. This level is the hardest to change.
Making a change in organizational culture= tackling all three levels
What is the toolview of organizational culture?
A view that sees culture as a rational instrument, designed by corporate leaders to achieve success (it is a financial instrument). Changing the organizational culture can be ethically problematic and can only be done to a certain extent.
Culture has the following characteristics:
* Individual enthusiasm manifested in the values of dedication, loyalty, self-sacrifice and passion. These values translate into use of the organizationally approved forms of language including buzzwords.
* Strong customer focus: all stakeholders are viewed as customers
* Management discourse characterized by a language of team and family inclusive to everyone
* Public display of the designer culture: intentionally placed artefacts.
What is the anthropological perspective on organizational culture?
Culture is a result of changing and emerging patterns in norms and values. Culture isn’t unitary (designable) but it is fragmentary. Cultures can’t be designed but they can be observed. Changing culture is complex, culture is an open, continuous and unpredictable process and so plans have to be iterated during the process to achieve a goal. Important for organizational culture is storytelling and organizational discourse and language (gossip, office talk, stories of legendary colleagues). Those stories are transmitted orally or in written form. The stories told within an organization are fragmented and diverse. Therefore, subcultures with entirely different views exist. Organizational culture is collectively created by subcultures and organizational members and therefore is hardly designable.
What is the integration perspective?
The integration perspective is based on unity of culture as given by top management. Organizational culture means that everyone in an organization agrees on the same cultural ideas and values, which are created by the top management (very similar to the tool view). Culture can be understood by observing the official sent out picture.
Limitation: functionalist view: seeing culture as the vehicle of integration for organization and
studying management wishes about cultures rather than culture itself
What is the differentiation perspective?
Multiple cultures exist within one culture, subcultures coexist. Different ideas and opinions live within different departments and levels of hierarchy. The focus here is on resistance and difference rather than unity in organizational culture.
The differentiation perspective is useful to sensitize managers to the complexity and conflict around
organizational culture.
Limitation: it does not give them (managers) actionable recommendations
What is the integration perspective?
Culture is dynamic, contsantly changing and fragmentary. Members constantly negotiate over what the organization is and over views. Therefore sometimes there is concensus and sometimes there is conflict. We distiguish two situations:
Integrated: when it reflects a wide consensus, a shared understanding around culture.
Differentiated, when it is confined to separate subcultures.Fragmented when
ambiguous.
Because culture is ever-changing measuring it becomes useless, only snapshots can be taken.
What criticisms are there on Hofstede’s dimenions?
- What does an average tell us about the culture of a
country? - Is it really national culture that produces the
variance in Hofstede‘s value dimensions across
countries? - Can we assume cultural homogeneity of nations?
What are the underlying assumptions within the theory of Hofstede?
- Values are invariant and stable preferences,
universally shared by the population of a given
country - national culture as statistically measurable through
self-response survey quetsions - national culture determines the organizational
culture
What is the overall conclusion within the The Political Dynamics of Organizational Culture (Rodriguez, 2006) paper?
When a powerful group (subculture) within the organization supports the organizational culture, it tends to be integrated. However, when the leading group (management) cannot satisfy the other organizational members (subcultures), fragmentation is likely to occur.
Cultural change is ais a multi-level process.
What is social drama?
An instrument that creates and stabilizes the social order of an organization.
Social order= a system of rules that guides interaction.
What did the article by Rosen strive to achieve?
The text gives a better understanding of the function of social drama within an organization (like Christmas dinners) for the creation and stabilization of social order.
Key message: through social dramas, employees can be brought in line with the organizational goals. By creating shared meaning, which legitimize organizational structure, rituals (like
Christmas dinners) sustain order.
In the article by Rosen, how did they go to work?
They went native (ethnographic research) in the organization of Schoenman and associates (an advertising agency) during a christmas dinner. The research ment descrbing a lot of (artefactural) aspects such as dress code, interaction,food and drinks, structure and decoration of the rooms, reactions and behavior of people, and music.
Ethnographic means to study an organization by becoming
a temporary member of it.
What are the conclusions within the article by Rosen?
- The blurring of boundary between work and non-work, between boss and subordinate,
between honest concern and joke is in large part an ultimate state of normative control - The social drama allows for a managerially sanctioned vision of the organization of few
functional and hierarchical distinctions and comraderie rather than exploitation - The social drama is a „mass enactement in which ‚culture‘ emerges as an organizing
principle“ (p. 470) - Control is thus not exercised explicitly through extensive rules systems but through
culture and the creation of shared meaning - These shared meanings are created and enacted through dress code, behavior, jokes,
the elicitation of emotion, shared drinks and food, dance and laughter - “An existential order is presented, and through presentation influenced into being.” (p.
469)
