Organizational Culture, Rule-Governed Behavior and Organizational Behavior Management

Theoretical Foundations and Implications for Research and Practice

Thomas C Mawhinney

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136584176
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Organizational Culture, Rule-Governed Behavior and Organizational Behavior Management is an introduction to concepts that link organizational behavior management (OBM) with the fields of organizational ecology, cultural anthropology, organizational development, and organizational behavior. This important book can help OBM researchers and managers more precisely analyze complex work environments to develop more comprehensive yet highly focused interventions to improve individual and organizational effectiveness. Organizational Culture, Rule-Governed Behavior and Organizational Behavior Management includes theoretical accounts of rule-governed behavior and cultural practices that expand the OBM's boundaries to include more comprehensive analyses and intervention designs that can lead to more effective and larger scale interventions.Although OBM researchers have long recognized that the relationships between an organization and its environment are important for survival, they have not made organization-environment relations a primary focus of their interventions. In addition, most descriptions of OBM interventions have not included a precise account of how the components of the interventions bring about ultimate performance changes they produce. With this book, OBM researchers will learn how to identify organizational behavior/performance targets that can be changed and adapted to constantly changing competitive environments to improve an organization's chances of survival. It also outlines two theories of rule-governed behavior. These theories characterize and explain how rules and their descriptions work to change or maintain effects of delayed rewards on current behavior/performance relationships. In so doing, they fill in the missing links required to achieve more valid and precise analyses of work environments that can be expected to result in more precise and effective OBM interventions.In Organizational Culture, Rule-Governed Behavior and Organizational Behavior Management, OBM researchers will learn how organizational cultural practices, organizational effectiveness, and rule-governed behaviors in organizations interact in complex ways to determine, in part, the adaptability and long-term survival of organizations. Reading this book will help academics, researchers, and practitioners better understand and predict how people in organizations will react to OBM interventions. All OBM managers including high-level managers, members of boards of directors and their consultants who are attempting to develop more effective organizations, will benefit from these discussions of organizational adaptation changing competitive environments. This essential volume presents organizational culture concepts cast in OBM terms that can be understood by all OBM researchers and practitioners and will be useful to anyone interested in organizational development on a large scale. Professors teaching OBM courses will find this presentation of rule-governed behavior an essential ingredient to every course in OBM.

Analysis of Cultural Processes and Concepts: Macro and Micro Levels

Evolution of Organizational Cultures as Selection by Consequences: The Gaia Hypothesis, Metacontingencies, and Organizational Ecology

T. C. Mawhinney

SUMMARY. Terms, concepts, and theories from biology, cultural anthropology, and behavior analysis are integrated to explain the evolution of organizational cultural practices. The universal concept in all three disciplines is natural selection by consequences as a causal mode which accounts for behavior of individuals, groups of people, and births and deaths of entire organizational cultures. These selection processes provide a theoretical framework which suggests a multi-disciplinary research agenda.

Selection as a causal mode in the evolution of behavioral processes and their relation to cultural evolution are summarized by Skinner (1981) as follows:

Selection by consequences is a causal mode found only in living things, or machines made by living things. It was first recognized in natural selection, but also accounts for the shaping and maintenance of the behavior of the individual and the evolution of cultures. In all three of these fields, it replaces explanations based on the causal modes of classical mechanics. The replacement is strongly resisted. Natural selection has now made its case, but similar delays in recognizing the role of selection in other fields could deprive us of valuable help in solving the problems which confront us. (Skinner, 1981, p. 501)

Major upheavals in industrial cultures have many undesirable consequences for people subjected to them. The collapse of the U.S. Steel Corporation’s oligopoly (Adams, 1986) provides a dramatic example, on a larger scale, of a scenario played out year in and year out on a smaller scale among numerous small companies founded only to die soon after. But, the past appears not to function as a prologue for prevention of cultural collapses such as in “big steel.” Other industries exhibit similar cultural tendencies which may dispose them to a similar fate.

These problems, huge organizational cultures becoming unstable and collapsing, appear to be related to a “natural process” of industrial cultural evolution in which cultures are founded and disband (Hannan & Freeman, 1989). Although the consequences of such processes produce aversive and unavoidable events in the lives of many people who play no direct role in their occurrence, the process has no conscience. The process is a natural evolutionary one. And, evolutionary processes are amoral (Gould, 1983).

The natural process of cultural evolution might be forestalled if organizations were more than “machine like” creations of people. Except for mechanical technologies employed in them, organizational cultures are not “machine like” creations of people. Rather, they are complex interlocking relationships among people in human cultures (Harris, 1979; Glenn, 1988, 1991); they are living systems (Miller, 1978). As living systems their behavior is accounted for by a causal mode of selection by consequences. Thus, the position which opposes the applicability of machine metaphors to characterize organizational behavior is well founded while the position which opposes the applicability of biological metaphors is not well founded (cf. Daft & Weick, 1984). Organizations are living systems composed, first, of organized human social behavior and, second, various physical artifacts produced by human behavior.

The idea that displacements associated with organizational deaths can be avoided by invoking rational decision rules and following them is attractive (March & Simon, 1958; Thompson, 1967). After all, decisions made and acted upon at the individual and group levels in organizations eventually translate into the aggregate measures of organizational success and failure at the organizational level of analysis, e.g., profits and losses. Whether individuals or organizations can maximize with respect to a long term objective, such as survival, is problematic. Classical theories of outcome maximization require the decision maker to identify all possible alternative courses of action and the consequences which will accrue to any chosen alternative. Therefore, such theories assume the decision maker has near perfect information regarding current and future states of the decision environment. Within complex organizational choice situations, it is virtually impossible for a decision maker to satisfy this assumption (March & Simon, 1958). On the other hand, in a simple laboratory situation a subject has been able to identify and follow rules of income maximization within a nontrivial choice setting (Mawhinney, 1982). In this experiment the subject, provided with repeated exposures to the set of choices, generated and followed income maximizing rules in what was clearly an instance of learning and problem solving (Skinner, 1968).

When human subjects in choice experiments do not engage in problem solving behavior aimed at maximizing income from repeated choices across time, they do not make optimal choices, and they do depart from optimal choice patterns in ways predicted by melioration and reinforcement matching (Herrnstein, 1990). Optimization or maximization by humans depends on collecting accurate information about how their environment works (i.e., choice-outcome rules or contingencies) and on following optimization or maximization rules when making choices based on the information collected. Incomplete information can limit the decision maker to close approximations rather than ultimate optimization and maximization. Optimization and maximization can also be limited by the individual decision maker’s experience with applying normative decision rules. Humans are known to exhibit decision making biases which inhibit optimization and maximization. Normative rules for both information gathering and choice making which prevent known biases are often taught to business school students in organizational behavior courses (see Organ & Bateman, 1991).

Not every top level decision maker has necessarily been exposed to such courses. Even among those who have, application of what has been learned depends upon local cultural contingencies. For example, the organization may or may not have developed the means to provide required information and may or may not reward decision makers for following decision making rules. Thus, avoiding the displacements associated with organizational decline and death is more likely to accrue to organizations which can retain resourceful information concerning how their environments work and provide rewards for decision makers who engage in following normative rules. This is more likely to occur in organizations which can function as interpretive or learning systems that “know” the requirements for survival in the organizations’ environments (Daft & Weick, 1984; Hedberg, 1981). In the absence of the support that such organizational systems provide, individuals respond in the present to a future about which their own experiences permit a limited view (Rachlin, 1989). At best, future oriented rule governed choices are attempts to “beat the odds” about what future conditions will come to pass and what organizational responses are most appropriate to make under those conditions.

Many organizational decisions are distributed across time. If the organization survives long enough, decisions are distributed across generations of decision makers and decision making groups. In organizations which are long lived, there exists the opportunity for interpretive and learning systems to evolve within them, whether or not they do evolve. In such cases it is possible for decisions at one point in time to commit the organization to a path from which it is difficult to turn in another direction. This would be particularly true if the interpretive and learning system developed an incorrect vision of requirements for long term survival, while efficiently producing short term benefits. Short run successes might falsely suggest the interpretive system was valid even though shot term successes would be at the expense of long term death. Ideally, organizational decision makers would learn to construct and follow rules which integrate costs and benefits which accrue in both short and long term time horizons. For example, long term survival often requires that current profits be forsaken to invest in technological change or updating which will raise the probability of long term survival. Profits and losses occur at the organizational level of analysis even though the decisions upon which they depend occur at the level of the individual(s) or group(s) making critical decisions related to profits and losses. Thus, whenever reference is made to organizational level behavior, e.g., its profitability, flexibility, etc., this behavior is understood to be a summary measure of collective organizational member behavior.

The blame for a dramatic decline of an industry or organization may seem to be the responsibility of its current chief decision maker, group, or system. In reality the decline is often the realization of a process begun at some earlier point in the evolution of the organizational culture. For example, responsibility for collapse of U.S Steel Corporation is not to be found in some single top level decision taken during the crisis of the 1960s and 1970s. The collapse was the consequence of a series of strategic decisions made as early as the organization’s founding, just after the turn of the century, and failure of its leadership to invest in and adopt advanced technological innovations on several important occasions. As every top level executive decision then and now, these past decisions were based on an analysis of social contingencies that explain the immediate behavior of top level decision makers and decision making groups (Skinner, 1969). Explaining immediate behavior in terms of social contingencies is not difficult. The board of directors may demand a resignation from the executive who fails to deliver dividends to shareholders in the short term. However, explaining the “origins of social contingencies” governing the decision is difficult (Skinner, 1953). To understand the origins is to understand the processes governing the evolution of cultural practices in organizations, some of the most important of which shape top level decision making about corporate policies, strategies, and tactics (Gilbert, 1978).

Some organizations appear to defy the odds against them by evolving with their changing environments in the face of changing leadership at the top and wide swings in the business cycle (Handlin, 1992). Should these currently successful organizational cultures serve as models to guide construction of other organizations engaged in producing other goods and services? This approach to building effective organizational cultures would obviate the need to engage in a program of research concerning how cultural evolutionary processes work on formal organizations. But, lessons from history teach that rules extracted from one set of circumstances applied to different circumstances under the assumption that they “should work” everywhere, will, sooner or later, produce unanticipated negative results. For example, reinforcement schedules and other pay systems have actually reduced performance levels in some circumstances (Mawhinney, 1975; Peach & Wren, 1992) and organizations have run up incentive systems expenses while failing to achieve the cost savings to fund them (Redmon & Agnew, 1991). A well developed science regarding the causal processes responsible for a phenomenon (Moxley, 1989; Othersen & Othersen, 1987) (e.g., organizational cultures, organizational effectiveness, and survival) is an important requirement for achieving artfully crafted and effective applications (Cohen & Filipczak, 1989; Zemke & Gunkler, 1982). Thus, before one can effectively deal with issues concerning when and how to intervene in an organizational culture, it is imperative that one understand the historical causes of its current configuration. These causes are found in the processes of cultural evolution which have shaped the organizational culture.

The purpose of this article is to introduce two related vantage points on the explanation of organizational cultural evolution. The first is the Gaia Hypothesis which describes all life on earth as the result of a selforganizing and self-regulating ecological system (Lovelock, 1988). The second is an extension of the Gaia Hypothesis applied to the self-organizing and self-regulating behaviors among formal organizations that populate some bounded social/economic environment (Hannan & Freeman, 1989). These two vantage points-evolution of life on earth and evolution of formal organizational populations-correlate with the notions about selection as a causal mode summarized by Skinner (1981) above, i.e., only those life or organizational cultural forms which are maintained by the current environmental consequences of their actions live while others perish. The bridge between the two vantage points and organizational behavior analysis is provided by Glenn’s interpretation and extension of Harris’ model (1979) called “cultural materialism” in the field of cultural anthropology (Glenn, 1988; 1991).

The Gaia Hypothesis: Earth as a Living System

Lovelock has taken seriously the possibility that the planet Earth, viewed in its entirety, is alive. He named the living planet Gaia (pronounced gay-ah), a name the Greeks gave to the Earth Goddess. He called his hypothesis that Earth lives, the Gaia Hypothesis. He admits, “The idea that the Earth is alive is at the outer bounds of scientific credibility” (Lovelock, 1988, p. 3). Having said that, however, he advances his case using selection by consequences as a causal mode to explain the evolution of all life on Earth. His contention is that all life in the current system shares in the maintenance of atmospheric (and oceanic) parameters required for all current life on the planet and in its seas.

Not accepting teleological explanations, natural scientists prefer objectivity in explanations of the behavior of living systems. Therefore, other scientists initially objected to the Gaia Hypothesis on grounds that it was teleological and seemed to require foresight and planning by the biota; “How in the world could the bacteria, the trees, and the animals have a conference to decide the optimum conditions [for the survival and maintenance of life among all of them]?” (Lovelock, 1988, p. 33). Looking ahead to organizational cultural life, one might well ask the following: How does any one person or group in an organization as complex as GM or the Federal Government plan for and achieve optimal, even minimal conditions for organizational or national life?

Of tremendous intuitive appeal is the idea that “adaptation” accounts for the way things are-that living things and organizations are adapted to local environmental constraints. Individuals see and experience in a relatively constant way the slowly changing contingencies to which they think they can adapt. However, variations in life per se and organizational cultural evolution in particular, change the constraints to which a current life or organizational form may be required to adapt. When the limits of adaptation are exceeded by a changing set of environmental constraints, those life and organizational forms that cannot adapt will perish. At the moment of current observation those forms still in the game of life will appear to have adapted to the current conditions whether or not a process of adaptation or natural selection more accuratel...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Editor
• Preface
• Analysis of Cultural Processes and Concepts: Macro and Micro Levels
• Two Theories of Rule-Governed Behavior
• Comments on Malott's Theory Paper and the Theoretical Analysis by Malott, Shimamune, and Malott
• A Theoretical Analysis of Rule-Governed Behavior and an OBM Intervention Within Structural and Cultural Constraints