Organizational Culture in Action

A Cultural Analysis Workbook

Gerald Driskill

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429764080
• Edizione: 3
• Argomento: Negocios y empresa
• Categoria: Comunicación empresarial

Offering students and practitioners an applied approach to the subject, Organizational Culture in Action (OCA) walks them through a six-step model for analyzing an organization's culture to provide insight into positive communication practices to improve organizational ethics and effectiveness.

The authors review relevant theory while integrating a constitutive approach to studying organizational culture and communication. Practical guides for multiple data collection methods are provided, and the workbook format is full of interactive tools that engage students and reinforce learning. The revised OCA cultural analysis model in this edition provides the below elements.

• The revised first step in the model – "articulating the value of cultural analysis" includes connections to public relations and crisis management.

• A definition of communication and the analysis process that foregrounds ethics throughout the book is included.

• Recent research on organizational moral learning is integrated in the ethics chapter, and throughout the book.

• The Communicative Constitutive of Organizations is now foregrounded throughout the book, and reflected in a table capturing variable and metaphor approaches to culture.

• The latest applied research is integrated in units on diversity, change, leadership, and effectiveness in relation to positive organizational communication.

• Enriched guides on multiple data collection methods now includes surveys.

• Cases, examples, and applications relevant to crisis, employee engagement, virtual organizations, conflict management, and public relations are provided.

Professionals come away equipped to apply cultural insights to fostering inclusiveness in relation to diversity, supporting organizational change, making leadership more dynamic, understanding the link between ethics and culture, and achieving personal and professional growth.

Part I

Cultural Analysis Planning

Chapter 1

Introduction

Setting the Stage

Organizations are more than the places we work. They include places that carry humans from the cradle to the grave. The “Organizational Culture in Action” (OCA) model is introduced as a valuable tool grounded in constitutive theories of communication. As such it promises to provide insight of significance to organizations such as diversity, change, engagement, leadership, and ethics. Frequently asked questions are covered in relation to the value and goals of the cultural analysis process, the significance of how we define organizational communication and culture, the continued relevance and value of using a drama/theater metaphor, as well as criteria for selecting an organization for analysis.

I was backstage. Not as an actor, but as an observer. I looked up in awe at the myriad of lights and ropes. I glanced at the various props and backdrops anticipating a performance. All was silent. I looked at the deep purple folds of the still drawn curtain. A single unbidden thought entered my mind. A sense of panic grew as this thought took hold of my imagination: What if the curtains were opened and I was really on stage? Right now, this instant! What if I were on stage for real?

Gerald Driskill

Objectives

• Reflect on the pervasiveness of organizations in our lives.

• State the goal of cultural analysis.

• Apply guides for selecting an organization for analysis.

Stage Terms

• Organizations.

• Organizational communication.

• Organizational culture.

• Cultural analysis.

• Dramatism.

• Organizational performance.

Cradle to Grave

When asked to name and describe an organization, like us you may often first think of a workplace. However, by focusing on workplaces we miss the shaping force of other organizations. Our first experiences in organizations were like many of yours: bright lights and masked strangers welcomed us into a hospital birthing room. Since that time, we have lived, breathed, laughed and cried, worked or consulted with, and dreamed and been bored in a wide array of organizations including daycares, schools, businesses, non-profits, prisons, churches, universities, and nursing homes. These varied experiences have inspired us, and at times left us broken by the dysfunction and unethical practices experienced. These highs and lows have created expectations and perceptions that follow us throughout life. Beyond the myriad examples of tragic and comic tales we could each tell from our experiences as employees, we also have countless stories from our experiences as customers, volunteers, members, and patients. The point is clear—we cannot escape an inextricable connection with organizations. Yet we easily take for granted the impact of organizations, the very stages on which we live out our lives.

Like you, we know something of the moments of panic when called on to perform: lead a meeting, confront or admit to an ethical failure, make a presentation, have a difficult conversation; yet, in such moments we may not be aware of the way the lights, the props, and our assumptions about our audience shape and constrain our performances. We know when to show up, we may or may not notice when know when something goes right or wrong with a piece of equipment or a relationship, but we rarely see the big picture of how all the various aspects of the stage impact us. We continue to develop ideas in this book with students and colleagues as a way to equip us to create more competent, more meaningful, purposeful, and ethical organizational performances. Such performances are grounded in learning the way our communication shapes and is shaped by the culture of the organization as well.

Organizations are places that carry us from cradle to grave by shaping our sense of ethics, identity, role, and meaning in life.

In the years that have passed since the startling birth experience, we have come to believe that organizations are no more and no less than a significant stage for human drama. Our research on cultures in hospitals, engineering firms, churches, banks, airlines, phone companies, schools, and day care centers and our service experiences in hospitals, prisons, multinationals, and nursing homes have all underscored our conviction that organizations are far more than the places where we work and make money. They are places that carry us from “the cradle to the grave” by shaping our sense of ethics, identity, role, and meaning in life.

Thus, while our motivation to study organizations began with a pragmatic sense that our livelihoods depended on being able to work in organizations, a deeper, more fundamental concern has emerged. We want to improve our ability to shape and direct organizations in ways that are more humane and ethical. We believe such an effort to be fundamental to practitioners, scholars, teachers, and students, but more importantly as participants in the human drama. The goal of this workbook, therefore, is not simply to teach you how to conduct a cultural analysis, but it has implications for your role as a leader within an organization and within your community. In short, the workbook is designed to help you do better what you do almost every day—make decisions about the best ways to lead ethically, to create meaning, value and purpose along with others in your organization(s). Our approach is inherently concerned with ethics. Rather than relegating ethics to an individual chapter or side bar as Dr. Meisenbach (2017), an organizational scholar and professor, laments is often the case, ethics is a thread woven into our thinking about communication and each stage of the analysis process outlined in the coming chapters. The assumption is that ethics are embedded in our individual intentional and unintentional decision-making as well as the organizing practices in organizations. The process of conducting a cultural analysis holds promise for surfacing practices that may clarify or distort, accurately represent or misrepresent, fully involve or marginalize interests of various groups.

In this first section, “Cultural Analysis Planning”, we offer two chapters. This opening chapter is focused on FAQs aimed at introducing you to terms, concepts, and the overall process of cultural analysis. The second chapter moves us into the first of six cultural analysis steps, articulating the value of the cultural analysis process.

FAQs on Cultural Analysis

This chapter sets the stage by clarifying our approach. While the remaining chapters provide greater depth on the “how to” of conducting an analysis, our goal here is to respond to common questions. As you review our responses to these questions you should gain a clearer sense of our approach, as well as options for purposes for conducting an analysis and criteria to consider in selecting an organization.

1. What Is the Value of the Cultural Analysis Process?

Chapter 2 focuses on the first formal phase or step of the cultural analysis process, developing your ability to articulate the value of this process. Still, a prelude is merited before exploring this question in depth. While the focus on culture” first emerged in the early 1980’s it continues to surface not only academic disciplines, but in the media and popular press. Even new trends or focus areas, such as “employee engagement” ultimately are about attending to culture. Comments from students and practitioners capture the value of this process at both the formal level and informal. The following are a few statements made by those who found value in conducting a formal analysis using the process outlined in this book.

• I now see the connections between culture and employee engagement.

• My analysis helped guide me to create a communication plan related to diversity.

• I used this process to improve recruitment and retention practices.

• I can now use cultural data to gain insight for change leadership and overall effectiveness.

• The cultural data helped me reflect on organizational ethics and leadership.

At the informal level, example comments included the following.

• I have learned that in any organization, change must start with me.

• I now have the ability to see situations from different perspectives.

• I got my last job because the interviewer was intrigued by my answers about organizational culture and how quickly I could “read” the organization.

• I have improved my ability to apply theory to the real world.

• I saved myself a lot of time and energy by deciding during an interview process that I didn’t fit the culture. Even though the salary was great, I would have become frustrated quickly.

While you may not experience all of these specific learning insights, we are confident that anyone completing this process, either at a formal or informal level, will benefit. Regardless of your goals, we are confident that as a result of learning this process, you can become a more competent and assured actor in your organization, better able to understand and question, and improve basic organizational assumptions and practices. Furthermore, as we will stress again in the final chapters, this process is not about finding problems, but describing the culture and then discerning positive communication applications. We have found again and again that this process is a way of seeing our organizational communication and our own communication in a different light. While other cultural analysis tools (e.g., Dennison and Gallop) are available and discussed in the Introduction to Part III on “Cultural Data Collection and Interpretation”, we maintain the value of the OCA model introduced here rests in the focus on the way organizations are created and recreated or constituted in communicative practices. This interdisciplinary application of established communication theories, discussed further in Chapters 2 and 3, promises insight to communicative practices relevant to such topics as organizational engagement, leadership, diversity, ethics, and change. This communication perspective is explored further in our response to the next question.

2. What Is an Organization (and Organizational Communication)?

We all know what organizations are, right? Textbooks tend to introduce definitions and then move on, leaving them buried in the opening chapter. We contend that more is at stake with definitions than an academic exercise. Definitions involve our thinking and assumptions about the nature of organizations and communication. Therefore, before you review the definitions of organization found below, take a minute to write your own. Pause now. Write your own. Ok, continue reading. As you read the following definitions of organization and organizational communication, see what they share in common with and/or how they differ with your own. First, organizations, as you might anticipate, have been defined in various ways:

• They involve “… five critical features—namely, the existence of a social collectivity, organizational and individual goals, coordinating activity, organizational structure, and the embedding of the organization with an environment of other organizations” (Miller & Barbour, 2015, p. 11).

• a “dynamic system of organizational members, influenced by external stakeholders, who communicate within and across organizational structures in a purposeful and ordered way to achieve a superordinate goal” (Keyton, 2005, p. 10).

• “a social interaction system, influenced by prevailing economic and legal institutional practices, and including coordinated action and interaction within and across a socially constructed system boundary, manifestly directed toward a privileged set of outcomes” (McPhee & Zaug, 2009, p. 28)

As you review these definitions of organization in light of your own, what emerges? The natural tendency is to carry an image of some group of people, perhaps working in a building toward some shared goals. This image does aid our thinking about a particular group and perhaps the role of communication in helping us reach shared goals. Yet, the building or container image misses key ideas that we will explore throughout the analysis process. Consider the extent to which your definition was inclusive of a few key ideas found in those given definitions with a focus on the f...