Session 5 - Managing cultural change Flashcards
Draw Johnson and Scholes’ (1992) cultural web
Look at lecture 5 notes
Explain what the cultural web is
Identifies 6 different interrelated elements that help to make up what Johnson and Scholes call the paradigm - the pattern or model - of the work environment.
- by analysing the factors in each, you can begin to see the bigger picture of your culture: what is working, what isn’t working, and what needs to be changed
What did Clifford Geertz propose culture looked like?
An octopus
- head = shared values of the organisation
- tentacles = sub-cultures
- water around the octopus = movement
What are Martin’s (1992) three contrasting perspectives on culture?
- integration perspective
- differentiation perspective
- ambiguity perspective
What is the integration perspective of culture?
Culture shared across the whole organisation
- change seen as top-down
What is the differentiation perspective of culture?
Sub-cultures: smaller units within an organisation
- change would be localised
What is the ambiguity perspective of culture?
Culture overlaps between different groups and movement between them (employees have to make sense of this)
- change is on-going
What do definitions of strategy and culture have in common?
Culture and strategy are very similar
They are interrelated
- they guide both expression and interpretation
- they are embodied in actions of judging, creating, justifying, affirming and sanctioning
- they summarize past achievements and practices that work
- they provide continuity, identity and a consistent way of ordering the world
- they are social, summarizing what is necessary to mesh ones own actions with those of others
- they are often neither completely explicit nor completely articulated which means that expressions of culture and strategy may vary in specifics
- their substance is most clearly seen when people confront unfamiliar situations
- they are tenacious understandings that resist change and are unlikely to change
Outline the strategies for change for order and continuity
- first order change
- ‘changing in order to stay the same’
- motion but not movement
- morphostatic change
Outline the strategies for change and discontinuity
- second order change
- motion and movement
- morphogenic (transformational) change
What role does HRM have in managing culture?
Recruitment and selection procedures
- selecting those who are culturally compatible
- want to hire people who already share values
Induction, socialisation and training
- informal aspect
Performance appraisal
- what is appraised
- what time orientation
- what methods
- who conducts the appraisal
Reward systems
Other means
- transfer and secondments
- opportunities for participation
- formal communication
- counselling
What are the different rites (Trice and Beyer, 1990) and explain
Rites of passage: facilitate the transition of outsiders to insiders
Rites of enhancement: celebrate accomplishments to reinforce behaviours consonant with required culture
Rites of degradation: individuals publicly identified with failures and stripped of positions or status
Rites of conflict reduction: help change by acknowledging and resolving difference of opinion
Rites of integration: help foster social cohesion
Rites of renewal: help to maintain organisation in current form
What does Bate (1994) note about cultural change, in comparison to other forms of change?
Cultural change approaches cannot be described as ‘culture-specific’
- in practice, there is little, if any, difference between the ways people are trying to change culture and the ways they would typically go about changing structures, technology, operational systems, or any other aspect of their organisation
What do organisations need to take account of when attempting to change culture?
The culture to be changed
- diagnosis
- thinking culturally
Its origins and trajectory through time
- prevents ‘corporate amnesia’
The life cycle of the culture and the stage in the cycle the culture has reached
The environmental context
- cultural lag
The aims and ambitions of the parties involved
- recognition of political issues
- consideration of what can be achieved
What are Bate’s (1994) 4 approaches for cultural change?
- aggressive approach
- conciliative approach
- corrosive approach
- educative approach
Outline the features of the aggressive approach for cultural change
- “cultural vandalism”
- “purpose is to create disruption among the local population…and to give clear notice of the intention of establishing a new cultural order”
- invalidation and delegitimisation of past practices
- use of fear
- sensitivity is not its strong point
- idea is to achieve rapid change by the suppression of alternative perspectives
- procrustean style: people are squeezed into the scheme with little regard for their feelings or preferences
What is the rationale behind the aggressive approach?
- survival = last ditch effort to lift an organisation out of crisis (e.g. Japanese brewery Asahi whose market share had dropped from 36% to 10% over a 35 year period)
- to bring about new culture you need discontinuity
- initiative: some aggressives claim justification for their approach on the grounds that they must seize the initiative in order to ensure a high probability of success
What are the dangers of using the aggressive approach?
- culture change but not in the intended direction
- increased segmentalism and resistance
Outline the features of the conciliative approach for cultural change
- highly participative
- changed achieved by non-dramatic, gradual and routine means
Pollner (1987): “You have to just keep beavering away”
- conciliators regard natives to be reasonable people
- flexible, accommodating and egalitarian discourse
- pragmatic and eclectic
- mutuality is a key principle
- doesn’t accept that there has to be a dialectical confrontation between different interests in order change to occur
What is the rationale behind the conciliative approach?
- perceived lack of power
- conflict avoidance: best way to achieve substantive cultural change is to collude rather than collide
- continuity: better to have gradual and continuous development of form rather than the sudden and discontinuous creation of new forms
- simultaneous construction/deconstruction
- competence: should stick to what you do best
What are the dangers of using the conciliative approach?
- paradigm bound: never progress beyond initial conforming stage
- may be a lot of talk and not much change
- conciliative approach is more likely to be successful in bringing about first order ‘developmental’ change, rather than second order ‘transformational’ change
- possibility of achieving revolution by evolution?
- time: takes longer
Outline the features of the corrosive approach for cultural change
- cultural change is essentially a political process
- main purpose is to effect a major change in the locus and distribution of power and authority within the corporate hierarchy
- pluralists (as with the conciliatives)
- the invisible network of the power structure is the important part of the organisation
- covert and devious: skilfully manipulating relationships in order to achieve their ends
- corrosives work by erosion rather than eradication
- progressively undermining the power base of rival groups
What is the rational behind the corrosive approach?
- pulling rather than pushing change
- focus on actions rather than words
- use of networks
- corrosives choose to influence cultural change and development by varying type, quality, shape and density of their relationships and interactions
What are the dangers of using the conciliative approach?
- networks can easily become order-directed rather than change-directed
- relies on informal personal relationships that change frequently
Outline the features of the educative approach for cultural change
- concept of cultural change as a learning process
- learning is planned and programmed, not incidental
- professionally managed learning process
- participants are taught the new culture through structured training and education
- culture programmes are socialization programmes: their aim is to ‘fit’ the participating individual to someone else’s previously formulated definition of the situation
- Disneyland University is a prime example of the educative approach to cultural change
What is the rational behind the educative approach?
- attempts to change the underlying frames of meanings and values
What are the dangers of using the educative approach?
- few people on courses ‘convert’
- does it work through day to day behaviour?
What could be a possible sequence to use Bate’s four approaches to change in?
1) aggressive
2) conciliative
3) educative
4) corrosive
What does developing an effective approach to change involve?
- 4 ideal types not necessarily used in their pure form
- culture change can’t be seen as a one-off
morphogenetic approach required
- a more fluid model that allows different approaches to be used at different stages of the change programme
- no one best approach or even one best sequence of approaches
- managers need to develop a varied repertoire: different skills to manage content, context and process of change
What is Hughes’ (2011) critical perspective?
- conceptual vagueness and unitarist assumptions
- time horizons
- can it be managed by senior managers?
- culture change initiatives more likely to influence official as opposed to unofficial culture
- also the ethics of cultural control: even if we can influence peoples’ values, should we?
