Organizational Culture and Leadership, Schein, E. (2010)

What comes to mind when someone speaks to you about the “culture” of an organization?

• Commonly used words relating to culture
• Observed behavioral regularities when people interact
• Group norms
• Espoused values
• Formal philosophy
• Rules of the game
• Climate
• Embedded skills
• Habits of thinking, mental models, linguistic paradigms
• Shared meanings
• Root metaphors or integrating symbols
• Formal rituals and celebrations

            A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, which has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.

            Culture and Leadership are two sides of the same coin. Leaders first create cultures when they create groups and organizations. Once cultures exist, they determine the criteria for leadership and thus determine who will or will not be a leader. If the culture becomes dysfunctional, it is the unique function of leadership to perceive the dysfunctional elements of the existing culture and to manage cultural evolution and change in such a way that the group can survive in a changing environment (step outside the culture and start evolutionary change).

            Cultural leadership is both a dynamic process, being constantly enacted and created and a set of structures, routines, rules, and norms that guide and constrain behavior. The culture then creates the essence of leadership. On the one hand, cultural norms define how an organization defines leadership. On the other hand, it can be argued that the unique talent of leaders is their ability to understand and work with culture; and that it is an ultimate act of leadership to destroy culture when it is viewed as dysfunctional.

       Artifacts are on the surface level. All the phenomena that one sees, hears, and feels when one encounters a new group with an unfamiliar culture are artifact. This includes visible products; language; technology and products; creations; style; observed rituals and ceremonies. The climate of the group is an artifact of the deeper cultural levels. Visible organizational structures and processes are easy to observe but difficult to decipher.

            The basic underlying assumptions about culture are unconscious, taken-for-granted beliefs, perceptions, thoughts and feelings. Ultimately, we all use sources of values and action and very little variation within a social unit. Shared and mutually reinforced perceptions tend to be non-confrontable and non-debatable, and therefore, are difficult to change. At both the individual and group level they can be thought of as psychological cognitive defense mechanisms. Leaders must decipher these basic underlying assumptions to know how to interpret the artifacts and articulated values. The essence of a culture lies in the pattern of basic underlying assumptions (maybe be an interlocking, coordinated set of assumptions). Cultural DNA seems to be a key to acknowledge during a leader’s development because leadership is originally the source of the beliefs and values. If what the leader proposes works and continues to work, what once were only the leaders assumptions gradually become shared assumptions. The most central issue for leaders is how to get at the deeper levels of a culture, how to assess the functionality of the assumptions made at that level, and how to deal with the anxiety that is unleashed when those levels are challenged. Two keys to successful culture change are the management of the large amounts of anxiety that accompany any relearning at this level. The assessment of whether the potential for new learning is even present.

            Understanding how culture evolves at the small group level is necessary to understanding how culture may evolve at the organizational level. We bring culture with us from our past experience but we are constantly reinforcing that culture or building new elements as we encounter new people and new experiences. If someone asks us to change our way of thinking or perceiving, and that way is based on what we have leaned in a group that we belong to, we will resist the change because we will not want to deviate from our group even if privately we think that the group is wrong. As Schein point out, every group must solve the problems of member identity, common goals, mechanisms of influence, and how to manage both aggression and intimacy. Schein also points out the various stages of group evolution:

• Group formation– Dependence: The leader knows what we should do;

• Group building– Fusion: We are a great group; we all like each other;

• Group work– Work: We can perform effectively because we know and accept each other;

• Group maturity– Maturity: We know who we are, what we want, and how to get it. We have       been successful, so we must be right.

            Cultural assumptions evolve around all aspects of a group’s relationship to its external environment. The group’s ultimate mission, goals, means used to achieve goals, measurement of performance, and remedial strategies all require consensus if the group is to perform effectively.

How external survival issues are worked out strongly influences the internal integration of a group. Culture is a multidimensional, multifaceted phenomenon, not easily reduced to a few major dimensions. Culture ultimately reflects the group’s efforts to cope and learn; it is the residue of the learning process.

            What does this mean within the implications for leaders: External issues are usually the leader’s primary concern in that it is the leader who creates the group and wants it to succeed. The successful management of boundary management, survival and growth are the basis for which leaders are assessed (If a leader fails in the external functions, he or she is usually abandoned, voted out, or gotten rid of).     

            In reality there is little agreement about what corporate culture really is. Some authors claim it is everything, others say it is the same as strategy and structure. Still others say it is only one element of several that define an organization. There also are debates about culture v. climate.

            In addition, there are different methods and tools for assessing organizational cultures; each yields different results. Schein (2010) is possibly the most well-known of the culture theorists. His theory’s roots are in psychology. More than others, Schein explains how culture develops and why it is hard to change.  

            Some say the problem with Schein’s approach (2010) is that it is too academic and not practical to use. Yet, his approach reveals completely different dimensions of culture than the first two theories we read for last week. This week we will take a deep look at Schein’s work and how it can be used to diagnose organizational culture as well as continue discussing different conceptions of organizational culture and the culture assessment tools and/or processes that derive from them.

            Organizational culture refers to the collection of traditions, values, norms, policies, and beliefs that constitutes a pervasive context for everything people do and think in an organization. It also refers to as the set of shared, taken-for-granted implicit assumptions that a group holds and that determines how it perceives, thinks about, and reacts to its various environments (Schein, 2010). It reflects the underlying assumption about the way the work is performed, about what is acceptable and not acceptable, and what behavior and actions are encouraged and discouraged cum the dos and don'ts in an organization. It encapsulates the reason for an organization being in existence including its long term aims and objectives. Thus, its indices within organizations include its products, technology, architectural design, language/ communication style, dress code, mission and vision. Organizational culture has a central role to play in the life of any organization as its analysis aids in the understanding of what goes on inside and outside of the organization, especially as it relates to the interactions within the organization and to its external stakeholders. This also implies that members in an organization develop a collective identity which helps them to work together and helps them in the course of adaptation to external environment.

            Distinction is often made between dominant cultures and subcultures, strong culture and weak culture (Schein, 2010). The dominant culture represents the organization's core values. This has been interpreted to mean organizational distinctive "personality", while subcultures are found in departments, divisions, and geographical areas, and represent the common experience of employees who reside in those areas. In an instance of large corporate organization, the dominant culture resides in the corporate/ head office. The subcultures of various departments and geographical units must complement the dominant culture at the corporate office. Within a university system for example, the objectives of each department (teaching and non-teaching) and faculties must complement the overall objectives of the university as a whole. In addition also are strong and weak organizational cultures. There is a strong organizational culture when the corporate culture has a significant influence on the behavior of employees due to high intensity of attachment to the culture. When the opposite is the case, we talk of weak organizational culture. For example, dress code can be described as strong culture within the banking system which all employees must comply strictly with, compare to the university system where employees are free to suit themselves when it comes to the issue of dressing.

            Leadership is a relationship concept. It is a social influence process in which the leader seeks the voluntary participation of subordinates in an effort to reach organizational goals. Leadership style is the pattern of behaviors engaged in by the leader when dealing with employees. Various leadership patterns have different implications for employees' satisfaction and performance. Leaders face the challenge of creating long term vision and direction for the organization, and create processes and decisions that lead to the required organizational change and effectiveness.

            The search for the universally correct leadership style is doomed to failure because of cultural variation by country, industry, occupation, and the particular history of an organization.

The value of typologies is that they simplify thinking and provide useful categories for sorting out the complexities we must deal with when we confront organizational realities. (The “Doing” orientation, the “Being” orientation, the “Being-in-Becoming” orientation).

            The weakness of cultural typologies is that they oversimplify the complexities, limit our perspective by focusing on a few dimensions, and limit our ability to find complex patterns.

Organizational culture and leadership are two inseparable constructs as the owners of organizations, through their values and beliefs determine the culture of the organization and deliver same to the leadership which is passed on to new entrants through the process of socialization. Both organizational culture and leadership interact to influence various organizational decisions and processes as well as employee work attitudes like job satisfaction and performance.

            So how can a leader begin culture creation? Culture arises when the leader’s individual assumptions lead to shared experiences that solve the group’s problems of external survival and internal integration.  Culture is created through the actions of founders who act as strong leaders. The leaders bring their own beliefs, values, and assumptions about how groups should work and what the goals of the organization are. Once a leader activates a group, he/she propose initial answers to the young group’s questions about how to operate internally and externally. Founders select colleagues and subordinates who they sense will think like them. If assumptions are correct, they can create powerful organizations whose culture comes to reflect their original assumptions. If environment changes and assumptions are incorrect, the organization must find a way to change.

            As organizations mature and grow, leaders will be replaced that is just a part of the process of change and growth. With growth will come differentiation into subgroups and the growth of subcultures such as functional/occupational differentiation, geographical decentralization, differentiation by product, market or technology, divisionalization, differentiation by hierarchical level. A critical function of leadership is to recognize cultural consequences of the various ways of differentiating and find ways to coordinate, align, and integrate different subcultures. Leaders will need to mesh the different subcultures by encouraging the evolution of common goals, common language, and common procedures for problem solving. Survival anxiety or guilt must be greater than learning anxiety because learning anxiety must be reduced rather than increasing survival anxiety. The change goal must be defined concretely in terms of the specific problem you are trying to fix, not as “culture change”. Old cultural elements can be destroyed by eliminating the people who “carry” those elements, but new cultural elements can only be learned if the new behavior leads to success and satisfaction. Culture change is always transformative change that requires a period of unlearning that is psychologically painful. In a more complex, fast-paced, culturally diverse future, organizations and their leaders will have to become perpetual learners.

            Culture as a paradox: Can one stabilize perpetual learning and change?  Maybe by making a learning culture one can adapt to the changes occurring within the organization and a proactivity assumption. By being a proactive problem solvers and learner one can commitment to learning to learn. Value learning, reflection and experimentation have positive assumptions about human nature and belief that ultimately human nature is good and malleable.

            The assumption that the environment can be dominated and commitment to truth through pragmatism and inquiry is a key element in leading within an organization. While the learning process must be shared by all. Orientation toward the future commitment to full and open task relevant communication, commitment to diversity, commitment to systemic thinking. A true leader must have the belief that the world is complex, nonlinear, and interconnected. Be commitment to cultural analysis for understanding and improving the world.

            A final thought, “Cultural understanding and cultural learning starts with self-insight”.

Reference:

Schein, E. (2010), Organizational Culture and Leadership, 4^th Edition, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco, California.