In my last post I took my first hesitant step at questioning whether there is such a thing as organisational culture. In this post, I will assume there is such a thing as organisational culture, but I argue that if there is such a thing as organisational culture, then organisations do not have ONE culture, but many.

It is rather common to assume that organisations are coherent, and that all organisational members share a similar kind of values. When you consider the likes of an insurance company, with its actuaries busy calculating risk tables, and sales people busy talking up the benefits of various policies, it does not take much to appreciate that in fact there are multiple groups in organisations and they do not share the same values necessarily.

Take for example any of the classic organisational battles between groups such as sales and marketing, R & D and marketing, sales and finance, HR and line managers and it becomes very evident that not everyone in the organisation shares the same values or culture.

Organisations are characterised by rather complex differentiation of work tasks, departments and hierarchical levels and this differentiation fosters strong differences in meanings, values and symbols. The variety of generations, classes, occupational groups and genders tends to produce and sustain variety and fragmentation of cultures rather than unity of ONE culture in the organisation (Alvesson and Sveningsson, 2008).

Perhaps the concept of corporate culture refers to the beliefs of the senior managers about what the culture should be. The beliefs of top managers can marginalise the beliefs of others in the organisation.

Although I started out back in the 90s believing in the construct of company culture as a way of explaining common themes of behaviour in organisations, now I am not so sure.

It seems to me that many people in an organisation interact with one another and these myriad interactions make up the organisation.  Tools, buildings, assets and property are utilised in the service of these interactions. These interactions are characterised by themes that are familiar, perhaps repetitive and perhaps even stuck, such as great new ideas coming from brainstorming meetings, or consistent bagging of management – these are both examples of themes emerging from multiple interactions.

The patterns emerging from the myriad interactions that take place in organisations have the quality of there being large numbers of small perturbations in the organisation and small numbers of large perturbations. What I mean by this is that over the many interactions that occur, there are lots that have small implications for the company and for the relationships between the people – these are the normal kind of interactions that might result in comradeship, antagonism, or in enabling normal work to be done. From time to time, there will be (relatively rare) occasions when certain interactions stir up a widespread response, such as New Zealand’s current anti-smacking law, by which the theme of the desirability of smacking children as part of discipline has been questioned in a national referendum. Such widespread take up of themes is relatively rare, however.

This phenomenon of large numbers of small perturbations and small numbers of large perturbations ilustrates a defining quality of complexity. (Note that elsewhere I have argued that organisations are not systems, not even complex systems). You could look at it this way – imagine a landscape with lots of small hills and a few large mountains. That is the kind of pattern you see in the disturbances and ripples of the impact of many interactions between people in an organisation over time.

Even the most powerful people such as CEOs are interacting with a relatively small number of other people. Some of those interactions have major impacts, perhaps through greater symbolic meaning such as on a road show or in an important meeting with the Board, management team or a crucial customer, while a much greater number of them have "ordinary" impact. Not every interaction results in revolutionary insight, most result in a pattern of sensemaking amongst those involved.

These population-wide patterns that emerge from many interactions, are, I think, what have typically been referred to as company culture. The company is made up of the members interacting in "local" ways, by which I mean that they interact with a relatively small number of others, and there is no overall blueprint or plan for those myriad interactions. At the same time as the members make up the organisation, so the organisation as a group collective influences the make up of the group.

Company culture is a term that refers to the impact that the company has on the individuals concerned. I have increasingly come to doubt whether there is such a thing as company culture. You may not be convinced yet and I will return to this theme in future posts. Perhaps I am just concerned about the idea that corporate culture is something (i.e. is a physical "thing" or something with properties similar to a physical thing)  that can be managed in the service of the most powerful managers.

If culture is a phenomenon that emerges from myriad interactions amongst organisational members, then it cannot be managed from outside as a whole. Instead, the top managers can only influence culture from within their own participation in interactions with others. Senior managers cannot design the culture that they want, nor can they engage other specialists to design the desired culture. They can only influence culture through their interactions with others.

No wonder leaders say that communication is so important.

According to Alvesson and Sveningsson’s excellent new book Changing Organizational Culture, key dimensions of change that are common in the literature include:

1. The scale of change
2. The sources of change
3. The content of change
4. The politics of change

The Scale of Change

Change is often characterised in terms of two extremes as revolutionary or evolutionary. Revolutionary change refers to changes that affect several aspects of the organisation simultaneously, such as culture, resources, performance management systems, strategy, technology, market positioning. Evolutionary change refers to operational change that affects part of the organisation within existing strategy and resources.

The following scales are also used to characterise organisational change:

• revolutionary vs evolutionary
• discontinuous vs continuous
• episodic vs continuing flow
• transformational vs transactional
• strategic vs operational
• total system vs local option

Alvesson and Sveningsson point out that these labels and distinctions often mean roughly the same.

The Sources of Change

The sources of change can vary – hence a distinction between planned change and emergent change. In planned change, the intentions of top managers are central, and in emergent change, the source is those outside top management. Emergent change emphasises the messy nature of change. Planned change includes the grand change projects often involving HR staff and consultants, including re-engineering, TQM, new technology, mergers and acquisitions, restructuring and so on.

The Politics of Change

Strategy is the result of political processes where bargaining, negotiating, lobbying and power relations are used to further the interests of top managers. The political dimension of change is often downplayed, perhaps by being framed in rational and analytically accepted terms which are useful especially when change is challenged.

The Content of Change

The content refers to the specifics of the change, whether it’s restructuring, re-engineering, strategy, customer orientation, new production systems or whatever. Often many aspects of the content are related to each other, for example a culture change is often seen as affecting aspects such as management control systems, strategy and structure.

Conclusion

Alvesson and Sveningsson go on to point out that these categories are not so neat and tidy as they might first appear. Depending on your position in the organisation, the scale of change might look quite different. What appears as minor and incremental to a senior person might be seen as radical and revolutionary by someone else. Personal interests, background, education, hierarchical position and other factors all influence how you see and categorise the change.

There are plenty of examples where change that is seen as major by the top managers is disregarded by the troops. The converse is also common, where the troops see a change as far more significant than the managers; many cases of industrial unrest and strikes reflect this different perception.

These views of change are also affected by whether you see organisational change as discontinuous and episodic or as continuous. Major planned change initiatives are often implemented on the assumption that change occurs from time to time and the organisation reverts back to stability or equilibrium in between. Seen at a distance organisations can appear quite stable (episodic change), but looked at closely they can appear to be constantly changing as people leave, customers and suppliers change and new products are developed (continuous change).

Changing your organisation is often thought of as meaning changing organisational culture. The term "organizational cultures" first was used by Pettigrew in 1979 in an article titled "On Studying Organizational Cultures" in the scholarly journal Administrative Science Quarterly.

To me it is quite significant that he used the plural, denoting that there are many cultures within an organisation. It is a more recent thing to talk about an organisation as having one culture only (a "corporate culture"). I think it is more accurate to think of there being multiple cultures within an organisation, as there are many groups that people in your organisation belong to, and people are included and excluded from these groups as they are in all social groupings.

Pettigrew brought concepts from anthropology and sociology to his studies of organisations. He was interested in studying organisations over time through continuous processes ("longitudinal" or "processual" studies). In particular, he wanted to link the history and future of the organisation to the present (other discussions of this can be found here, here, and here).  Pettigrew studied the birth and evolution of a boarding school from 1934 to 1972, and he came to see this history as a series of what he called social dramas (I might call them narratives), anchored by the reigns of three particular headmasters and a structural change that altered the school’s population.

Pettigrew saw culture as the source of a family of concepts – symbols, language, ideology, belief, ritual and myth.

The concept of organisational culture is thus relatively recent (since 1979) and went through its faddish period where everything was seen as being about culture.

From the way the knowledge management and IT people talk, it seems that nowadays, the concept of organisational culture still retains some mystery about it and is seen as difficult to change. It is common in my experience for knowledge management and IT people to articulate elegant technical solutions and then to wrap up all the reasons why these lovely technical solutions don’t or might not work as the human element of "culture," quite outside their expertise to address.

It wasn’t long before Peters and Waterman in "In Search of Excellence" were claiming that shared values represented the core of corporate culture. The empirical work (i.e. quantitative research) of Hofstede et al in "Measuring Organizational Cultures" showed that, to the contrary, it was shared perceptions of daily practices that were the core of culture. This reinforces my constant catch cry to reflect on your practices and those of the others in your organisation if you want to change your organisation.

Hofstede et al identified six characteristics of the corporate culture construct:

• Culture is holistic – it involves a group and cannot be reduced to single individuals.
   
• Culture is historically determined – it emerges over time and is manifest in traditions and customs.
   
• Antropological terms such as "myth," "ritual," "symbols" are commonly used to describe culture.
   
• Culture is socially constructed, meaning that it arises from processes of interaction of different people – not from any universal characteristics of human beings (hence different groups can be said to have different cultures).
   
• Culture is soft – difficult to catch hold of and difficult to measure.
   
• Culture is inert and difficult to change. People tend to hold on to their values and traditions.

It didn’t take long before organisational culture was seen as something that could be managed and subjected to the wills of the domininat coalitions of the organisation. The articulation of the concept of organisational culture meant that it soon came to be seen as something that could be manipulated in service of the organisation’s objectives.

Interestingly he has criticised ”disembodied" culture change programmes and I am struck by his insight that employee engagement is similarly disembodied from the "everyday experience of organizational practice and performance." When he talks about the disembodiment of culture change, he is meaning the way that it is common to treat culture as a thing that is separate from everyday interaction, a thing that is a separate building block of performance that can be managed independently of daily conversation.

The measurement of employee engagement by means of surveys leads to engagement being thought of as a thing independent of human interaction, that can be objectively measured and managed.

To my way of thinking, employee engagement refers only to human interaction and is not something outside of people in organisations interacting with each other. By definition it cannot be outside human interaction. And because we are human beings, we cannot stand outside of human interaction. Managers cannot stand outside of their interactions with their employees and measure them objectively.

So the notion of measuring employee engagement is of doubtful value, particularly if it results in people taking their eye off their results and their interactions with others.

Chris Rodgers suggests that instead, "the ‘real’ engagement task for leaders is twofold:

• Helping individuals to make sense of everyday events and emerging challenges in the context of their local interactions; and, in the light of this, to take action in ways that contribute to the achievement of local organizational objectives.
• Doing so in ways that also resonate with individuals’ own aspirations and personal agendas." 

HR is concerned with the formal lines of communication in the organisation. HR advice follows the organisation chart. What I mean by this is that in the HR world, communication happens in cascades. It trickles down from the managers to the staff through channels that follow the formal reporting lines of the organisation chart.

And in the world of HR and corporate communications, "communication" has come to mean "key messages" that the powerful people want to give to the less powerful people. The key messages are delivered through the formal channels of communication. These key messages are usually about the more powerful people wanting the less powerful people to do things differently. If the less powerful people question this, it is called "resistance."

And yet it is also common knowledge that the informal networks of communication are so important that they can destroy even the best-executed planned communications programme. The grapevine can destroy or subvert initiatives from head office. These informal networks inhabit the white space of the organisation chart.

As a CEO or manager of an organisation undergoing change, I think you must make sure your change initiatives take account of the white space in the organisation chart. In times of change you should be considering the informal communication networks in your organisation as well as the formal reporting lines.

The question is how to do this. I have found engaging in two way conversations rather than one way presentations to be the best way. The danger is that things will go out of your control if you truly engage with them. Don’t worry about that. After all, you never were in control any way. Right?

Comments welcomed.