29 Dec Consider the potential

Organizational Culture

Week 1: Organizational Culture: What Is It?

As you have learned from the Background readings, organizational culture is one of four critical factors that contribute to the success or failure of organizational change; that is, the organization’s culture must exist in a state that is ready—and amenable—to change.

What is organizational culture? What are its characteristics? What role does the organization’s culture play in the processes of organizational change and transformation?

Week 2: Organizational Culture: Can Culture Truly Be “Managed”?

Some organizational theorists would assert that an organization’s culture cannot be “managed” in the same sense that the processes, activities, and things that exist within an organization can be managed. David Campbell (2000, p. 28) says that an organization

is being constructed continuously on a daily, even momentary [italics added], basis through individual interactions with others. The organization never settles into an entity or a thing that can be labelled and described, because it is constantly changing, or reinventing itself, through the interactions going on within it.

At the same time, Campbell says that an organization “does have a certain character to it, such that, like driving on the motorway, not just anything goes” Let’s consider a massive multinational organization with thousands of employees: Clearly, no one individual—no matter the extent to which he or she has legitimate and/or expert power—is capable of single-handedly affecting culture (i.e., moving it in one direction or another); the sheer multiplicity of formal and informal groups, structures, tasks, functional operations, and individual interactions that exist and occur within many large organizations are seemingly endless.

Consider the potential number (and combination) of individual-to-individual, individual-to-group, and group-to-group interactions that are likely to occur on a momentary basis within an organization (and then, there are endless numbers of contacts/interactions with external stakeholders as well). The possibilities are seemingly infinite—or at least they are indefinite.

However the concept of organizational “culture” is defined, culture is abstract, fragmentary, fluid—and even relative and momentary. Which leads to the question:

Can an organization’s culture really be “managed”?

Reference:

Campbell, D. (2000). The socially constructed organization. London: Karnac Books.