Organizational Culture and Leadership

Edgar H. Schein, Peter A. Schein

• Publisher: Wiley
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781119212058
• Edition: 5
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

The book that defined the field, updated and expanded for today's organizations

Organizational Culture and Leadership is the classic reference for managers and students seeking a deeper understanding of the inter-relationship of organizational culture dynamics and leadership. Author Edgar Schein is the 'father' of organizational culture, world-renowned for his expertise and research in the field; in this book, he analyzes and illustrates through cases the abstract concept of culture and shows its importance to the management of organizational change. This new fifth edition shows how culture has become a popular concept leading to a wide variety of research and implementation by various organizations and expands the focus on the role of national cultures in influencing culture dynamics, including some practical concepts for how to deal with international differences.

Special emphasis is given to how the role of leadership varies with the age of the organization from founding, through mid-life to old age as the cultural issues vary at each stage. How culture change is managed at each stage and in different types of organizations is emphasized as a central concern of leader behavior..

This landmark book is considered the defining resource in the field. Drawing on a wide range of research, this fifth edition contains 25 percent new and revised material to provide the most relevant new concepts and perspectives alongside the basic culture model that has helped to define the field.

Dig into assumptions and typologies to decipher organizational culture

• Learn how culture begins, thrives, or dies with leadership
• Manage cultural change effectively and appropriately
• Understand the leader's role in managing disparate groups

The resurgence of interest in organizational culture has spurred an awakening in research, and new information is continuously coming to light. Outdated practices are being replaced by more effective methods, and the resulting shift affects organizations everywhere. Organizational Culture and Leadership is an essential resource for scholars, consultants and leaders seeking continuous improvement in the face of today's business realities.

Part One


DEFINING THE STRUCTURE
OF CULTURE

To understand how culture works we need to differentiate two perspectives. The most obvious and immediate impulse is to look for culture content. What is the culture about, what are the key values that we need to understand, what are the rules of behavior? Different people have different biases and assumptions about what is important. In the current national context we see a great emphasis on the cultural content pertaining to the role of government, leadership, and management in deciding what is good for everyone and focusing on the values of individual freedom and autonomy. Another culture analysis might, however, say that this is totally irrelevant to what the values are around saving the planet and becoming environmentally responsible. A third person chimes in with the importance of family values and the threat to “our culture” of allowing civil marriage. Parents lament or praise the new values that their children are bringing into the culture, or are just plain puzzled about what this new “millennial” generation is all about. We have to watch our language lest we say something “politically incorrect” about racial or gender issues.

The point is that culture content, the values we care about are all over the map. To make some sense of this variety, we have to look first at the structure of culture and develop a perspective on how to analyze the complex cultural landscape we encounter. In the next four chapters I will develop a “model” of the structure of culture. We will analyze several organizational cultures, illustrate how nested they are in larger cultural units. Chapter 1 gives a dynamic definition of culture. Chapter 2 describes the basic three-level model of the “structure” of culture that will be used throughout the rest of the book. In Chapter 3 this model is illustrated with Digital Equipment Corporation, a U.S. computer company that I encountered in its early growth period and in which I could, therefore, observe the growth and evolution of a culture. In Chapter 4 I describe Ciba-Geigy, an old Swiss-German chemical company, that illustrates some of the problems of a mature industry in a very different technology and the impact of national culture. In Chapter 5 I describe the Singapore Economic Development Board, which illustrates both a fusion of Western and Asian national cultures and an organization in the public sector. The cases are intended to highlight that cultures are learned patterns of beliefs, values, assumptions, and behavioral norms that manifest themselves at different levels of observability.

1
HOW TO DEFINE CULTURE IN GENERAL

The Problem of Defining Culture Clearly

Culture has been studied for a long time by anthropologists and sociologists, resulting in many models and definitions of culture. Some of the ways that they have conceptualized the essence of culture illustrate the breadth as well as the depth of the concept. Most of the categories that follow refer primarily to macro cultures such as nations, occupations, or large organizations but some are also relevant to micro or subcultures. As you will see from the pattern of references, many researchers use several of these definitional categories, and they overlap to a considerable degree. Culture as we will see exists at many levels of “observabilty.” The categories are arranged roughly according to the degree to which you, as an observer, will be able to see and feel those cultural elements when you observe an organization or group.

• Observed behavioral regularities when people interact: The language they use along with the regularities in the interaction such as “Thank you” followed by “Don’t mention it,” or “How is your day going so far,” “Just fine.” Observed interaction patterns, customs, and traditions become evident in all groups in a variety of situations (e.g., Goffman, 1959, 1967; Jones, Moore, & Snyder, 1988; Trice & Beyer, 1993; Van Maanen, 1979).
• Climate: The feeling that is conveyed in a group by the physical layout and the way in which members of the organization interact with each other, with customers, or with other outsiders. Climate is sometimes included as an artifact of culture and is sometimes kept as a separate phenomenon to be analyzed (e.g., Ashkanasy, Wilderom, & Peterson, 2000; Schneider, 1990; Tagiuri & Litwin, 1968; Ehrhart, Schneider, & Macey, 2014).
• Formal rituals and celebrations: The ways in which a group celebrates key events that reflect important values or important “passages” by members such as promotion, completion of important projects, and milestones (Trice & Beyer, 1993; Deal & Kennedy, 1982, 1999).
• Espoused values: The articulated, publicly announced principles and values that the group claims to be trying to achieve, such as “product quality,” “price leadership,” or “safety” (e.g., Deal & Kennedy, 1982, 1999). Many companies in Silicon Valley such as Google and Netflix announce their culture in terms of such values in all of their recruiting materials and in books about themselves (Schmidt & Rosenberg, 2014).
• Formal philosophy: The broad policies and ideological principles that guide a group’s actions toward stockholders, employees, customers, and other stakeholders such as the highly publicized “HP way” of Hewlett-Packard or, more recently, the explicit statements about culture in Netflix and Google (e.g., Ouchi, 1981; Pascale & Athos, 1981; Packard, 1995; Schmidt & Rosenberg, 2014).
• Group norms: The implicit standards and values that evolve in working groups, such as the particular norm of “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” that evolved among workers in the Bank Wiring Room in the classic Hawthorne studies (e.g., Homans, 1950; Kilmann & Saxton, 1983).
• Rules of the game: These are the implicit, unwritten rules for getting along in the organization, “the ropes” that a newcomer must learn to become an accepted member, “the way we do things around here” (e.g., Schein, 1968, 1978; Van Maanen, 1976, 1979b; Ritti & Funkhouser, 1987; Deal & Kennedy, 1999).
• Identity and images of self: How the organization views itself in terms of “who we are,” “what is our purpose,” and “how we do things” (e.g., Schultz, 1995; Hatch, 1990; Hatch & Schultz, 2004).
• Embedded skills: The special competencies displayed by group members in accomplishing certain tasks, the ability to make certain things that get passed on from generation to generation without necessarily being articulated in writing (e.g., Argyris & Schon, 1978; Cook & Yanow, 1993; Peters & Waterman, 1982; Ang & Van Dyne, 2008).
• Habits of thinking, mental models, or linguistic paradigms: The shared cognitive frames that guide the perceptions, thoughts, and language used by the members of a group and are taught to new members in the socialization or “onboarding” process as it is now often called (e.g., Douglas, 1986; Hofstede, 1991, 2001, Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010; Van Maanen, 1979).
• Shared meanings: The emergent understandings that are created by group members as they interact with each other where the same words used in different cultures can have very different meanings (e.g., Geertz, 1973; Smircich, 1983; Van Maanen & Barley, 1984; Weick, 1995; Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001; Hatch & Schultz, 2004).
• “Root metaphors” or integrating symbols: The ways that groups evolve to characterize themselves, which may or may not be appreciated consciously but become embodied in buildings, office lay-outs, and other material artifacts of the group. This level of the culture reflects the emotional and aesthetic response of members as contrasted with the cognitive or evaluative response (e.g., Gagliardi, 1990; Hatch, 1990; Pondy, Frost, Morgan, & Dandridge, 1983; Schultz, 1995).

I have provided these many ways of defining culture to give you a sense that culture covers pretty much everything that a group has learned as it has evolved. When we look at macro cultures (e.g., nations or occupations) and want do describe their cultures, we need all of these specific concepts to capture their culture. However, in moving toward a usable definition of culture that you can apply to the organizations and groups that you will encounter and that you will want to decipher, we need a more integrative dynamic definition that highlights how culture forms and evolves in organizations, subcultures, and micro systems. The foregoing categories will help to define the content of a given culture, but defining them has to be a more dynamic holistic process.

The reason for such a formal definition at this point is to forewarn you that you will find many groups of various sizes with different shared patterns that must be understood on their own terms. You will see articles about how to change or even create cultures that don’t agree with each other or that don’t make sense. This definition is deliberately focused on the general process of how any culture is learned and will evolve, but in practice you will have to focus on different elements of that formal definition to make sense of the particular organizational situation you encounter. So let’s expand on and explain the importance of each component of that definition in preparation for the more detailed analysis of these elements that occur later on in this book.

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A Dynamic Definition of Culture

The culture of a group can be defined as the accumulated shared learning of that group as it solves 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, feel, and behave in relation to those problems.

This accumulated learning is a pattern or system of beliefs, values, and behavioral norms that come to be taken for granted as basic assumptions and eventually drop out of awareness.

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Accumulated Shared Learning

The most important element of the definition is to note that culture is a shared product of shared learning (Edmondson, 2012). If you understand that culture is a shared product of shared learning, you will realize several important corollaries that make culture complex. To fully understand a given group’s culture, we will need to know what kind of learning has taken place, over what span of time, and under what kinds of leadership. Deciphering such history is impossible with preliterate culture, nations, and some occupations; however, with contemporary organizations and work groups, it is possible and fruitful to begin culture analysis with historical analysis. I will keep referring to “the group,” but I mean this to include organizations of all kinds as well.

If learning is shared, all the group forces of identity formation and cohesion come into play in stabilizing that learning because it comes to define for the group who we are and what is our purpose or “reason to be.” The various components of what is learned then become a pattern of beliefs and values that give meaning to the daily activities and work of the group. If the group is successful in achieving its purpose and is internally well organized, it will come to take these beliefs and values along with the accompanying behavioral norms for granted and will teach them to newcomers as the way to think, feel, and behave. In many ways this can be thought of as the group’s sense of identity, which has both an external component of how the organization presents itself to the outside and an internal component of what its inner sense of itself is.

Basic Taken-for-Granted Assumptions—The Cultural DNA

The earliest shared learning provides meaning and stability and becomes, in a sense, the cultural DNA: the beliefs, values, and desired behaviors that launched the group and made it successful. This early level of beliefs, values, and desired behavior becomes nonnegotiable and turns into taken-for-granted basic assumptions that subsequently drop out of awareness. Such assumptions come to be very stable, serving as the source of later ways of doing things and elaborating the culture. What needs to be mentioned here is that these elements, learned early and composing the cultural DNA, are the source of the group’s stability and cannot be changed without changing the group altogether. This point has to be understood at the outset because culture-change programs can...