Micro MBA

Theory and Practice

Carolina Machado, J. Paulo Davim, Carolina Machado, J. Paulo Davim

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9783110481266
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Financial Accounting

Micro MBA focuses on accounting, economics, marketing, human resources, operations, finance and gives the "core" curriculum of subjects usually present in an MBA program. This book presents the key concepts to all those pursuing a managerial career in the technological and engineering industry on principles, strategies, models, techniques, methodologies and applications in the business area for non-economists.

David Starr-Glass

1Organizational culture: forces that shape thinking, behavior, and success

Abstract: A critical issue in business is that organizations are composed of individuals and social groups and that organizational outcomes rest on the creativity, efforts, and behavior of these different actors and social units. This chapter considers perhaps the most powerful and decisive aspect of people performance in organizations: organizational culture. The chapter explores the meaning of organizational culture and how culture informs organizational members of the root assumptions, values, and behaviors that constitute the organization’s raison d’être, vision, and future. It considers how cultures evolve within organizations, the pivotal role played by their founding members, and how organizational leadership can change culture, reshaping and refocusing it to contribute to the organization’s continuing survival and success.

Culture is an abstraction, yet the forces that are created in social and organizational situations that derive from culture are powerful. If we don’t understand the operation of these forces, we become victim to them. [1, p. 3]

1.1Introduction

In North America, Europe, and Australia there is a growing trend for business schools to design their curricula with graduate employability in mind. The challenge they confront is to provide a set of skills and competencies that will allow graduates to successfully enter the workplace, advance within it, and productively manage organizations and personal careers [2–4]. Graduate employability is particularly challenging for a number of interrelated reasons: (a) the work world is constantly changing, which makes it difficult to predict the skills and competencies that will be relevant in the future; (b) new knowledge and disruptive technologies are rapidly diffused; (c) the half-life of knowledge in many professional and disciplinary areas is not very long; and (d) computer-based artificial intelligence that renders many human-centered skills and competencies obsolete is being increasingly used [5–7].

Responding to these complex challenges, many business schools are now accentuating broader and more enduring skills, emphasizing critical and fundamental areas in their curricula, and cultivating a commitment to continuous intellectual growth and lifelong learning after graduation [8–10]. Most likely – given the nature of this book and its intended readership – you have made a commitment to lifelong learning. Further, given the predicted readership of this book (those in the scientific and engineering communities), this chapter might cover an area that has not been previously studied or that has not been considered particularly relevant.

This chapter might prove challenging because, unlike many of the “hard” and technically focused topics of conventional MBA programs, organizational culture is a “soft” topic, akin to subjects like organizational communication or interpersonal relationships. Although many science and engineering students prefer the reassuring nature of technically based “hard” areas of study in MBA programs, such as capital budgeting or managerial economics, it is important to realize that in the real work world, especially at middle and senior management levels, the competencies most in demand and most associated with success are those people-centered ones that many generations of business undergraduates have rather dismissively referred to as “soft” subjects [11, 12].

This chapter explores organizational culture by providing a critical working knowledge of the topic. Organizational culture is a very significant aspect of all social aggregations: project teams, work groups, and corporate organizations. An awareness of organizational culture is of critical importance for those who work in, or collaborate with, such groups. This importance is reflected in the simple definition of organizational culture offered by Schneider, who claims that organizational culture is “the way we do things in order to succeed” [13, p. 128, emphasis in original]. Further, the impact of organizational culture, and the profound challenges and opportunities that it presents to managers, is underscored by Edgar Schein, who advises that “the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture...to understand and work with culture...[and] to destroy culture when it is viewed as dysfunctional” [1, p. 11].

This chapter is organized as follows. Section 1.2 provides a broad review of culture at the levels of metaphor and national phenomenon. Section 1.3 considers culture as an organizational reality, while Section 1.4 explores the structure and nested layers of culture in organizational contexts. Section 1.5 examines organizational culture as an espoused value system and organizational climate that is the experienced culture projectedandconfirmedbyorganizationalprocesses, policies, and procedures.Section1.6 considers the role of leadership in organizational culture, including the role played by an organization’s founding leaders, mechanismsforperpetuating culture, and the processes through which present leaders can shift and realign culture. Section 1.7 briefly summarizes some of the main issues developed in the chapter. This final section is followed by a number of short questions that the reader might find helpful in reviewing the chapter. Answers to these questions are provided after the reference section.

1.2The multiple roots of culture

The underlying ideologies of an organization – that is, the “shared, interrelated sets of beliefs about how things work; values that indicate what’s worth having or doing; and norms that tell people how they should behave” [14, p. 33] – are recognized by all of those in the organization, but their cultural origins often remain unconsidered and unappreciated. Indeed, it might be said that the truly acculturated organizational participant is the one who self-identifies with the organization, behaves according to its norms, subscribes to its assumptions and values, and yet remains oblivious to the presence, power, or even existence of the organization’s underlying culture.

The central theme of this chapter is organizational culture. However, it is important to consider the other culture systems within which an organization and its culture are embedded because, to a great extent, cultures do not exist independently or uniquely but are nested in–andmoderatedby–one another. Rather than approaching culture as a singular phenomenon, it is better to think of it as a set of dynamic and fluid forces that come into play at different times, operate at different levels, produce different outcomes, and continuously undergo change even though those changes might seem gradual.

1.2.1Culture as a metaphor

At the outset, it is important to appreciate that when referring to culture (Latin: cultura = cultivation) we are employing a metaphor and that “culture in all of its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals” [15, p. 87]. Metaphorically, the growth of individuals and their development within a social setting has been compared with cultivating crops in fields or tending grapes in vineyards. Culture – as a process and as an outcome – is connected with growing, nurturing, supporting, and caring. However, over time, this agriculturally rooted metaphor has given rise to two different ways in which culture is conceived of in contemporary English:

–Culture as an exclusive quality: In the first sense – in which the roots of the agricultural metaphorical are stronger – culture is associated with a process of deliberate selection, careful propagation, and specific domestication, all designed to develop what are considered more refined human attributes and behaviors. In this older sense, culture is associated with an exclusive high culture as seen in intellectual development, aesthetic refinement, and civilized behavior. Here, culture is regarded as the exclusive domain or preoccupation of an elite social class, and culture differentiates between higher and lower social classes. The outcomes of this process are understood in terms of refinement, cultured minds, and cultured individuals.

–Culture as a common social experience: In the second sense – the sense used in this chapter and in organizational culture studies generally – culture is understood in a less restricted sense and is associated with growing up within a specific context, or with developing within a common social environment. Culture, consciously recognized or unrecognized experience, is encountered by everyone and shapes everyone. As Spencer-Oatey explains, “our notion of culture is not something exclusive to certain members; rather, it relates to the whole of a society. More-over, it is not value-laden.... they [cultures] are [only] similar or different to each other” [16, pp. 15–16].

As a construct, culture has been used in multiple senses, in different contexts, and in various fields of social science. It is hardly surprisingly that no single universally agreed-upon definition of culture has emerged; indeed, there are approximately a hundred different definitions in the literatures of anthropology and sociology [17, 18]. Reviewing these, Spencer-Oatey provides her own definition, although she concedes that any definition is likely to be partial, vague, and fuzzy. She defines culture as follows:

The assumptions and values, orientations to life, beliefs, policies, procedures and behavioural conventions that are shared by a group of people, and that influence (but do not determine) each member’s behaviour and his/ her interpretations of the ‘meaning’ of other people’s behaviour [16, p. 3].

1.2.2Culture as a national expression

Culture is a shared experience that develops in any context where there is prolonged social interaction. In trying to explain how culture develops, a commonly used unit of analysis has been the nation-state. However, in trying to identify distinctive national cultures, there are a number of significant problems: (a) defining the “nation” involved (e.g., its geopolitical borders, historical development, regional integrity and differences); (b) assessing the homogeneity of the national state (e.g., the extent of racial, ethnic, and religious diversity; distinctive social communities, subgroups, and enclaves; historical patterns of immigration and migration); and (c) constructing a set of stable, reliable, and valid dimensions through which different national cultur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Preface
• Contents
• Brief biographical sketches of editors
• List of contributing authors
• 1 Organizational culture: forces that shape thinking, behavior, and success
• 2 Corporate social responsibility reporting and sustainability
• 3 Project management
• 4 Consumer behavior: the importance of millennials in the tourism industry
• 5 Performance appraisal: a critical tool in effective human resource management
• 6 Job analysis: an application in a knowledge-intensive, high-performance SME
• Index