Leading Organizations through Transition

Communication and Cultural Change

Stanley A. Deetz, Sarah J. Tracy, Jennifer Lyn Simpson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 1999
• ISBN:
  9781506319674
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Lingue e linguistica
• Subtopic: Studi sulla comunicazione

This book addresses the role of communication in cultural change efforts within organizations, especially during periods of transition, mergers, technological innovations and globalization.

1

Managing Hearts, Minds, and Souls

Overview

Managing the hearts, minds, and souls of employees is a key element of building a successful business today. For the past 20 years this need has been loosely conceptualized as managing the “corporate culture.”

Actually, the concerns this term highlights have been of interest to leaders for a long time. John Clemens (1986) traced the Western world’s concern with corporate culture to a funeral oration by Pericles in 431 B.C. Pericles, now recognized as the father of Athens’s Golden Age, was attempting to inspire unity in his people in their battle with Sparta. The speech effectively displayed the two central elements of establishing a strong corporate culture: determining what makes the organization different and eloquently communicating those differences to the organizational members.

At least since that time, scholars and managers have tried to get a handle on the elusive subjective side of work life. Whether the concern has been with “spirit,” “climate,” “meaning of work,” or “quality of work life,” the core issues have been the same. Human beings are more than rational creatures. They are not animated machines. How employees personally feel, think, and see the company and their work have a significant impact on the character and quality of their work, their relation to management, and their response to innovation and change. Culture is a concept many have found useful and necessary to understanding, managing, and strategically changing organizations.

This chapter provides an introduction to the role of communication in developing and transforming corporate culture. First, the culture concept is developed in relation to the overall plan of building a business. Second is a discussion of the social, economic, and historical changes that have accentuated the concern with corporate culture in recent years. Third, the roots of the organizational culture approach in business are discussed. Finally, the concept of culture is developed in such a way as to aid our attention to the values and decisional premises that underlie organizational behavior and highlight different assumptions people make about the nature of others and work.

Key Objectives of the Chapter

• To develop the capacity to integrate cultural concerns in the overall business plan
• To recognize the conditions leading to the need to manage culture
• To recognize the external and internal factors contributing to specific cultural characteristics in an organization
• To identify different culture sites or levels
• To begin to examine how underlying values and decisional premises influence behavior and decisions in actual workplaces
• To recognize differences in the character of different cultures and the relation to work activities
• To recognize the fundamentally different assumptions people make about their work world and the consequences for leadership.

Questions to Consider

• When you build a strategic plan, how do you take into account human factors?
• How can various activities of an organization be difficult to coordinate?
• Do you feel that members of organizations you are involved in “walk their talk”? If so, where is this most evident? If not, what have been the consequences?
• Do you think that the wider national culture greatly influences the productivity of employees and companies?
• Do you think people naturally enjoy quality work? Do authority structures, reward systems, task quality, or intangibles of work life have the greatest influence on employee commitment and productivity?

Managing Culture as a Part of the Overall Strategic Plan

A successful business strategy results from a number of key considerations. First, market conditions largely determine the possible financial success of the selling of any good or service. Identification of and customizing the product to a particular market niche is central to building any business. Second, control of critical performance variables is central to keeping production costs down and meeting the challenge of potential competitors. Third, adequate monitoring of the environment and making adaptive changes is essential to continued success under changing resource and market conditions. Finally, a workforce must be recruited and developed in ways that support the aforementioned needs.

The Relation Between Strategy and Culture

The corporate culture is not just one of many considerations in building a business. Rather the culture impacts on each of the strategic dimensions listed above. The way organizational members think and feel influences the relation to the market, workplace performance, adaptability, and workforce development and commitment. A positive business strategy and positive corporate culture go hand in hand. An effective strategy must grow out of the culture and the culture must be strategically shaped.

A positive workplace culture actualizes the latent potential in all members and reduces the need for managerial intervention and direction. All employees have the potential to contribute, do right, achieve, and create. Accomplishing each of these potentials can be thwarted by various organizational blocks. The desire to contribute is blocked by uncertainty about purpose. The desire to do right is limited by work pressures and the temptation to serve one’s self. The desire to achieve can be sidetracked by lack of focus or of resources. And the desire to create cannot be fulfilled if opportunities are lacking or there is a fear of risk.

Actualizing these potentials requires both a business strategy and appropriate cultural conditions. The ability of an employee to contribute is enhanced by the effective communication of core values and mission. The ability to do right is aided by specifying and enforcing of the rules of the game. The ability to achieve is supported by carefully built and supported targets. And the ability to create is stimulated by open organizational dialogue to encourage learning.

If support for these potentials is built into the corporate culture, the need for direct intervention by upper managers is lessened and commitment, autonomy, and motivation are increased. The old view of business called for direct managerial supervision. Employees were seen as needing to be motivated, pushed, or coerced into meeting business objectives. Compliance was an endless issue. A corporate culture was developed and reinforced that required more of the same. The new cultural view says that employees are not inherently lazy and resistant, nor are they naturally motivated and open to change. The nature of the employee is a cultural product. A positive corporate culture creates employee potentials and the context in which they can be realized.

Culture enhances social integration; social integration eliminates the need for bureaucracy, and increases levels of investment which, in turn, enhance performance and productivity. Thus, by manipulating culture, substantial increments in profitability should accrue.

—Gideon Kunda and Stephen Barley (1988, p. 21)

Why Lead by Managing Culture?

Successful business leaders have gradually moved from traditional forms of management, primarily based in hierarchical decision making and managerial supervision and control, to managing by managing culture. Many reasons exist for this change. They have to do with structural, social, and market changes. As long as these new conditions persist, the competitive advantage will continue to go to businesses that focus on the corporate culture.

The most obvious, and best understood, reason for the change to managing corporate culture was the perception that some cultures lead to greater productivity than others. In the late 1970s, managers in the United States saw increasing economic difficulties in their companies largely arising from Japanese competition. Even superficial analyses revealed that cultural features were a major reason why Japanese workers were more productive and their products of higher quality. At that time, the stronger, clanlike corporate cultures of Japan provided production innovations and worker dedication unmatched by American companies. American managers rushed to learn the Japanese way and companies in the United States with strong cultures were suddenly highlighted. The success of Japanese companies, viewed partly as a result of their cultural distinctiveness, encouraged Western managers to analyze how their corporations could make better use of team spirit, corporate pride, and worker morale.

More subtle changes were taking place, however, that may account for the Japanese success at that time and the fact that cultural management has persisted longer than the Japanese success story. Important social changes and changes in the nature of products and work processes provided management with a crisis of control. The rise of professionalized workplaces, geographically dispersed facilities, decentralization, and turbulent markets contributed to the difficulty of coordination and control. As is explored in Chapter 2, each of these conditions makes corporate culture of more interest.

In the face of these changes, the use of more indirect and unobtrusive control through cultural management offers possibilities and advantages not shared by traditional activities. In fact, many workplaces could not function at all without a strong shared culture. Most of these new social realities are not likely to go away. Cultural management will continue to be a key feature of successful business for some time. Cultural management presents a different form of leadership, a form understood in Eastern cultures for some time:

The Way of Lao Tzu, Number 17

The best (rulers) are those whose existence is (merely) known by the people.

The next best are those who are loved and praised.

The next are those who are feared.

The next are those who are despised.

It is only when one does not have enough faith in others that others have no faith in him.

(The great rulers) value their words highly.

They accomplish their task; they complete their work.

Nevertheless their people say that they simply follow nature.

—4th/6th century B.C. (1963, p. 130)

If the leader used few but carefully chosen words, the way will seem natural and people will feel that the methods and accomplishments are their own.

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Exercise 1.1

• How can organizations contribute to the member’s potential to contribute, to do right, to achieve, and to create?
• When you consider yourself as a member of an organization (including an academic or university community), to what extent do you believe that your department’s administration has considered your beliefs and values? In what ways have these been taken into account? In which ways have they been ignored or glossed over?

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Historical Roots of the Cultural Approach

This ability to perceive the limitations of one’s...