Now think about your workplace. If silence falls when you, as the director, walk into a room; if unrest arises over a proposal to move the cafeteria; if you are excluded by your colleagues; if you, as the only woman in a meeting, are talked over when you try to make a point; if there is still reference to âthe other organizationâ three years after a merger; if medical specialists say that their professional sphere is endangered by the new financing system; if a police officer would rather be reprimanded than talk about his or her colleagues to a superiorâŚthatâs culture youâre experiencing, too.
How Do People Shape Culture?
Culture shapes people. But people also shape culture. Culture is, after all, not innate but constructed. It is a means for humans to create order from chaos. In culture, together, we find ways to answer questions of existence, to cope with time, power, scarcity, love and loss, to structure our lives and arrive at mutually determined social norms. We are not born with culture; we are born into it and we create it together with the people around us.
From infancy, we are taught how we should look, how we should behave and how we should perceive and experience the world. Some of these lessons are explicit. Mostly, however, cultural values and messages are so ingrained that they pass from generation to generation without conscience, motive or intention. For example, did you know that, at least in Western countries, the way we approach babies differs according to their gender? Research shows that adults actually make different greeting noises depending on whether an infant is a boy or girl and pick up baby boys just a bit more firmly. Our cultural gender lessons on how to be a boy or girl start very young. Just think about it: we are more often inclined to say to a boy that he is cool and to a girl that she is pretty.
We transmit our culture through language, gestures, rituals, symbols, stories, the honoring of heroes and role models, induction programs and initiation rites. Indeed, culture is so deeply rooted in the way a group of people thinks that it is difficult to think outside the box of oneâs own cultural pattern.
It is no different in organizations. People also create organizational cultures together, and the elements of those cultures are passed on to newcomers. If Mary leaves a department in an organization and Lawrence replaces her, after some initial hubbub, it is expected that Lawrence will assume the cultural behavioural norm, adjust himself to the new environment and things will settle down. The team member has changed, but the culture hasnât.
But the fact that culture is learned also offers the possibility that it can be altered. In terms of culture, change can be described as any modification to the existing arrangement of relationships, meanings and patterns of behaviour. To return to our example: itâs entirely possible that Lawrence, even while his thoughts and behaviours are influenced by the existing culture, will come into the group with new ideas, that he will develop his own power dynamics within the group and that the culture itself will change as a result. People shape culture and culture shapes people.
The truth is that cultures are changing constantly, sometimes subtly and sometimes radically. They change with the arrival of Lawrences (for example, new people), in response to technological innovations, as a consequence of events in the external world and shifts in the zeitgeist. But most of this cultural change happens the same way that our enculturation doesâwithout design or even desire. It is much more difficult to change a culture actively and intentionally in a specific direction. After all, how do you consciously influence an unconscious process? How do you get people on board with a new way of doing things? How do you tempt them to behave differently? How do you refocus people on achieving future goals when they are fixated on the way things were done in the past?
The reason that some leaders and managers avoid planned culture change altogether is because they know how hard it is; they anticipate failure. Instead they choose to concentrate on things like business operations and target numbers. Meanwhile, those who do attempt change frequently complain of resistance from members of the corporate tribe. The problem with this resistance, of course, is that it leaves culture in a liminal zone, threatening the tribe with a return to chaos.
The good news is that it is entirely possible to overcome, or at least reduce, this resistance to change. First, however, you have to understand what culture is, how it works and where it comes from. You have to find a way to grasp the intangible, to see the unseeable. You must recognize that most resistance to change arises not because people are against the new but because they do not want to lose what they find valuable in the current culture. Resistance is an expression of different, and often valuable, views. This kind of insight into the spaces between people creates opportunities for the successful re-ordering and transformation of a culture.
Anthropology is concerned with the âpower of in-between.â A corporate anthropologist looks at how various players and departments within an organization arrange their reality and give it meaning. How people shape culture and culture shapes people. Insight into the spaces between people creates opportunities for the successful re-ordering and transformation of a culture.
Grasping Culture: Three Approaches
How can we understand organizational culture? With language. We need a language that structures the way we see the spaces between people and helps us describe, and ultimately, interpret the meaning of what we find there. There are all sorts of theories and methods that offer us such languages, but they can be roughly divided into three main approaches:
Typologies
Organizations are described by a cohesive set of characteristicsâoften with a symbolic or metaphorical name, or linked to particular color schemes. Maybe you have heard of personality and organizational tests like Management Drives and Spiral Dynamics, in which a certain color is assigned to a scored profile. People who have used these models might say things like, âI am more of a red person and I find your blue reaction difficult to handle.â The advantage of typologies is that they instantly provide us with a feeling, summon up a total image, which makes cultures easier to discuss. This simplification is also the disadvantage, however, as the caricature sketched does not offer any room for details and exceptions within the group described; nor does it answer questions on how such a culture was formed and what the internal cohesion or functionality of the cultural patterns are. If you are not careful, working with typologies can become like reading horoscopes: if they are well written, you can always see something in it for you.
Dimensions
In this view, researchers assume that all cultures share the same dimensions but express different values within them. Researchers use tools, such as questionnaires, to measure select aspects of the organizational culture on a scale of, for example, one to ten. People like Fons Trompenaars and Geert Hofstede have defined a few dimensions that are important in every culture, but have different scores in different cultures. Think of dimensions like Individualism versus Collectivism, Universalism versus Particularism, and High and Low Power Distance (the extent to which the lower ranking individuals of a society accept and expect that power is distributed unequally). The advantage of this approach is that it allows you to compare different aspects of the culture or the development of one aspect over time. Thus you may conclude that the organization has, letâs say, become less normative and more pragmatic over the past three years. The disadvantage of the dimensions approach is that by quantifying intangible processes of signification, it creates a false sense of control and manageability. As if you could alter just one dimension of culture and leave the rest untouched. If you are not careful, the dimensional approach gives a fragmented view of a culture that is best understood as a cohesive whole.
Grounded theory
As a researcher, you submerge yourself as much as possible in the actual working environment of the organization in order to discover the structure and meaning that the people themselves assign to their world. You cannot achieve this by working from a previously established hypothesis or typology; rather, you must approach the situation with a completely open mind and allow a picture of reality to emerge. You start by observing, feeling, experiencing and interviewing. You then search for a pattern in your data and construct your theory, which you re-check in the field. You continually fine-tune the theory, often with input from those being researched. The advantage of this approach is that it does justice to the complexity of, and cohesion within, culture. The disadvantage is that, in some cases, it can be quite time consuming, and the validity of the result will depend largely on the skill and personality of the researcher.
In our work as corporate anthropologists, we use elements of all three approaches. Dimensions and typologies are tempting to use due to their simplicity and measurability, and clients often ask for this type of assessment. We also sometimes use typologies and dimensions to start up the dialogue on organizational culture and to make diagnoses. However, we frequently find these models limiting and worry that their reliance on pre-formed assumptions will cloud our view of an organizationâs unique nature. Our preferred approach to working with organizational culture is based on grounded theory.
We believe that grounded theory offers the most complex view of a culture. It gives us a chance to understand not only the function and meaning that individual aspects of the culture hold for members of a group, but also how those aspects fit together into a cohesive and coherent whole. Both pieces are crucial to our understanding of a culture and together give us the firmest foundation for carrying out change interventions. In the pages that follow, you will see how grounded theory shapes our practice and, later, learn about an approach we use to structure our observations, which requires neither scale nor typology.
