Organizational culture: "the way we do things around here"

An organization's culture consists of all the paradigms, values, beliefs, behaviours and experiences of its members. It is complex and always changing, yet has inertia and tries to protect itself. It emerges from the inside of organizations.

Some organizations have organizational cultures that help them succeed, others have cultures that help them fail. Culture is a source of competitive advantage between organizations.

Business Sculptors has experience helping leaders to understand and shift their organizations' cultures. This is a doable but challenging task, which forms part of our organization development services.

Assessing an organization's culture

Various excellent cultural assessment models and tools exist. However, since culture is such a complex phenomena, we tend to use a combination of models and tools to fit our clients' requirements.

• Goffee and Jone's Culture Model. This model understands organizational culture according to levels of sociability (a measure of friendliness and care in relating to one another) and solidarity (shared and understood goals to the benefit of the organization).

• Bob Anderson's Leadership Culture Model. This model looks at how people in an organization experience their senior leaders. It explores how these leaders create their organizations' culture. It also looks at the differences between the organizational culture that these leaders seek to create and the culture that actually exists.
  

• Fons Troppenaars' Culture Model. One aspect of this model focuses on how different cultures cope with common dilemmas. This model is popular amongst companies with multi-cultural workforces. It is used internationally by companies that employ from different cultures.

• Clare Grave's Spiral Dynamics Model. This model is based on the evolution of mankind and how mankind developed different clusters of values and beliefs to help it cope with varying life conditions. For each pattern of these patterns of beliefs and values, there is an appropriate leadership /management style, reward structure, learning style and working environment that these leaders need to cultivate.

Even when using these models, we are wary of cultural labeling - we have found that they result in a superficial understanding of a complex issue.

Changing an organization's culture

Since organizational culture is such a powerful force, leaders need to ensure that their organizations’ culture supports the types of behaviour they require from their followers.

Organizational culture cannot be changed by decree or manipulated mechanistically. Authentic leaders can however influence organizational culture in the right direction, and we believe they have a responsibility to do so. Leaders can influence culture by:

• behaving congruently with the desired culture and being a good role model;
• regularly communicating their vision for their organizations' culture and persuading other leaders to endorse this culture and act accordingly;
• rewarding (either formally or informally) those employees that live the desired culture;
• adjusting organizational systems to support the desired culture (for example, it may be necessary to change job descriptions, remuneration strategies, performance appraisal systems and management styles in order to promote a performance-orientated and initiative-taking culture;)
• tactfully modifying established symbols and rituals to reflect the desired culture;

Remember, it takes time to change organizational culture as it is changed through consensus, and not by outside demand. Leaders should also be careful to manage the change process involved in changing their organizations’ cultures.

What is the best culture for organizations?

There is no ideal or best culture or pre-packaged culture for organizations. There is only the most suitable culture for an organization, and this depends on factors such as its environment, business strategy and customer expectations. Organizations need to design their own cultures.

For some organizations a bureaucratic culture is appropriate, whereas for others an organic culture is best. Some organizations may also choose to cultivate a variety of subcultures within themselves.

We will guide leaders to create the right culture within their organizations - cultures that will help their organizations to succeed.