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About an organisation’s culture: What to know before learning more about it.
“How could we have known?” an executive asked after a project to change the organisation’s culture had failed. “That is why we
hired experts. We assumed that they knew what they were doing and we just followed their lead and advice.”
Since it became a trendy topic in the 1980’s, many interesting things have been said and written about cultural aspects within
organisations. There are many books on the subject that can be truly
informative to certain readers, such as works of Schein,
Hofstede, Denison and Quinn & Cameron. Over the years, even up until today, organisational culture
(in American English: organizational culture), seems to have retained much of its popularity amongst researchers and practitioners.
Unfortunately, not all that is said and written about this subject is equally informative, or even relevant to organisational culture, let
alone to certain issues one might be facing within organisations. This makes it harder for students, practitioners and clients to select valuable information
resources and to fully understand available information, put it into perspective and contextualise it.
This may have contributed to the existence of various wild theories, propositions and change practices aimed at (changing) organisations’ culture.
Even when excellent information sources are consulted, certain information is taken too literally, or not literally enough, methods
are applied that do not suit the organisation or issues at hand, and so on.
Sadly, many such practices have done little more than cost money and cause collective organisational grief and frustration.
I noticed that clients and students, once they had gained a basic understanding of certain aspects, found it easier to understand existing
literature, judge the expertise of others and determine which information sources are useful to them and which ones are not.
With regard to an organisation’s culture, the answers to the following questions may contribute to bringing about such basic understanding.
- What is organisational culture?
- Why is organisational culture important?
- How does an organisation’s culture come into being?
- How can an organisation’s culture be changed?
What is organisational culture?
Culture is cultivated behaviour
Therefore,
Organisational Culture is
cultivated behaviour within an organisation.
Stated differently:
Organisational Culture is
a collection of developed characteristics of
how organisation members generally tend to behave.
Importantly:
Human Behaviour is the core of an organisation’s culture.
Organisations tend to have more than one organisation
member. Each organisation member feels, thinks and behaves different from any
other organisation member. Under certain conditions, certain members may share
certain behaviour.
Categorisation tends to be used to describe an
organisation’s culture. Since all organisation members are different,
categorisation hardly ever fully applies to all an organisations’ members and
may even not apply at all to many of them.
Still, by generalising an ‘identified’ organisation’s
culture, too often certain characteristics and behaviours are wrongly ascribed
to many of the organisation’s individual members. This may be one reason why
change approaches to the ‘identified’ organisational culture may have
unexpected and undesired effects and outcomes.
(Why) is organisational culture important?
An
organisation’s functioning and performance is largely determined by the
extent to which the organisation’s means, procedures and its members’ behaviour
are aimed symbiotically towards achieving the purposed organisational results.
It should be obvious that an organisation does not perform
well if its members behave contrary to how they should behave to achieve the
organisation’s goals.
Conversely, as an organisation’s culture is more aligned
with achieving the intended organisational goals, chances increase for the organisation
to actually achieve those goals.
It seems important to realise that this does not mean that
each organisation has, or must have one distinguishable culture. After all,
achieving the organisations’ goals usually requires different organisation
members to behave quite differently from one another. This, combined with each
organisation member bringing along an individual culture, causes most
organisations to harbour multiple cultures.
How does an organisation’s culture come into being?
Uncultivated, organisation members’ behaviour will develop
from all that they are exposed to and undesired behaviour can freely exist and
spread.
As all cultivation, an organisation’s culture comes about in
the first place by the nature of its seedlings, in this case: by the nature of
organisation members. In other words: hiring a certain type of employees, will
direct the organisation’s culture in a certain direction.
Further cultivation is achieved by, on the one hand,
stimulating what germinates and nourishes the objectives (desired behaviour),
and on the other hand suppressing and weeding what prevents or hampers the
objectives from flourishing. Stated differently: the circumstances organisation
members face and the leadership and management they receive will help determine
to what extent certain characteristics of organisation members will be
suppressed, flourish or further develop.
Can an organisation’s culture be changed?
As you sow, so shall you reap. One cannot grow
potatoes from poppy seeds. If an organisation has employed staff members that
are predisposed to behave differently than fits the desired organisational
culture, then this is unfortunate. A behavioural
predisposition range is a range of behaviour someone is inclined to act
within, under certain conditions. Attempts to force humans to act consistently
outside their personal range are doomed to fail.
One who buys horses, and wants them to quack, swim, fly and lay eggs, apparently should have bought ducks instead.
An organisation, wishing to establish a culture that would
result in putting such force on its members, has several options, such as:
- Replace or discharge organisation members whose behavioural predisposition does
not match the desired organisational culture;
- Abandon ambitions to achieve the desired organisational culture;
- Adjust objectives so, that the desired organisational culture fits the current
organisation members’ predisposition;
- Compromise between 1 and 3.
We should not deceive ourselves into thinking that we can
change who people are. However, behaviour
alteration is possible, provided that the desired behaviour fits within the
behavioural predisposition range of those whose behaviour we intend to adjust.
Organisations’ cultures are not merely emergent and, within
behavioural predisposition ranges, culture can purposely be initiated,
manipulated, changed and improved. This can be driven by suitable leadership
and management, but it can equally be initiated and carried at any other
organisational level.
Focus on all major organisational aspects
An
effective organisation is an ensemble of human beings, tools and
procedures, aimed at achieving commensurable goals.
Consequently, significantly changing either one of those
aspects in an organisation, (for instance human behaviour), will affect the
organisation’s functioning.
For an organisation to stay effective after changing an
organisation’s culture, as well as to embed the changes in the organisation, appropriate
adjustments must also be made to relevant procedures and in many cases also to
relevant means.
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Content of this article is taken from:
Van Someren, R., 2016, Fundamentals of Organisations, The Hague, Van Someren, ISBN/EAN: 789079641109
Van Someren, R., 2014, Aptitude and Attitude as Constraints and Enablers in Organisation Development: An Elementary
Model of Organisational Processes, The Hague, Van Someren, ISBN/EAN: 9789079641086
René Van Someren’s personal website is: www.rene.vansomeren.org
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