Culture To The Organization's Members example essay topic

1 Introduction In this paper the content of two different chapters of respectively Daft and Gareth Morgan are summarized and then analysed. It firstly starts with a summary of Daft's chapter "Managing Organizational Culture and Ethics". Though the main focus is on Daft, there also are treated some aspects that Morgan is mentioning concerning organizational culture. Then Morgan's metaphor, where the organization is compared to a brain, is summarized. Sometimes examples or information from other sources than these two chapters are used in order to clarify the content of these chapters.

In the analysis the two chapters will be compared. Hereby the brain metaphor will be used as a means to understand various aspects of an organizational culture and the difficulties surrounding changing organizations. Finally the findings are discussed in the conclusions. 2 Summary:" Managing Organizational Culture and Ethics" 2.1 What is organizational culture? It is very hard to define something intangible as the concept of organizational culture.

As defined in Daft the organizational culture exists as the values and norms shared among its members. These values and norms control the way members interpret information, act, make decisions and interact with the environment. Thus to know one's organizational culture is very important because by changing these controlling values and norms it's possible to improve the organization's effectiveness. As mentioned the culture is formed by norms and values. What exactly are these norms and values? Values are principles, general criteria or mind sets that people use to determine if certain outcomes, behaviour and situations are desirable or undesirable.

There can be made a distinction between terminal and instrumental values. Terminal values are the ultimate end states or results that one wants to reach. Applied on organizations these values can for instance be excellence, profitability, quality and innovativeness. On the other hand, instrumental values are the desired modes of behaviour the organization encourages as for instance respecting traditions and authority, being creative or being conservative and cautious. The specific norms evolve out of these instrumental values. Daft describes these as "standards or styles of behaviours that are considered acceptable or typical for a group of people".

An important aspect of these values is that most of them (including those that are considered crucial for the organization) are not written down, but exist in shared norms, beliefs, thoughts and ways of behaviour that are used in interaction between people, the environment and the organization. Over time the members of the organization adopt these values and use them in their interpretations and actions. This collective mind-set, developed out of a combination of the desired final goals (terminal values) and the encouraged way of behaving (instrumental values) via corresponding norms and rules, forms the culture of the specific organization. 2.2 How is an organization's culture transmitted to its members? A problem that a lot of countries are facing is the assimilation of foreigners in their culture.

The issue is to transmit to them the national culture, often formed by a continuing process over centuries, in order to make their new citizens fit in and adopt the values that are considered important in that specific country. For companies this works in a similar way with perhaps the difference that in this case the culture has to be transmitted to both the current and new members. The ability of the organization's culture to motivate their members and so increase organizational effectiveness depends on the way in which these values are carried over to these members. Daft distinguishes between two different ways of transmitting these values to the employees: via formal socialization practices and informally via stories, ceremonies and organizational language. 2.2. 1 Socialization practices In order to assimilate in the organization newcomers should learn the appropriate values that are nurtured by that specific organization. Observing the members that are already integrated in the organization can in the first place be used to accomplish this.

A disadvantage of this method is that newcomers may observe and then adopt habits that are not desired by the organization. A way to avoid this problem and effectively transmit organizational values is through socialization. Following the model of Van Mannen and Schein it is possible that the organization to a certain extent 'controls' the values that the newcomers learn and in turn influence the role orientation the newcomers adopt (characteristic way they respond to a given situation). Van Mannen and Schein determine 12 socialization tactics that influence this role orientation. Collective Individual, Formal Informal, Sequential Random, Fixed Variable, Serial Disjunctive and Divestiture Investiture. The way these different sets of tactics are used leads to two different role orientations: institutionalised individualized.

An institutionalised role orientation means that all the members of the organization conform to the same way of behaviour. They are obedient and all respond in the same way to a given situation. A military organization is without a doubt the best example. On the opposite an individual role orientation means that the individual contribution is valued very high. Individuals should be creative and experiment with changing values. The company has to choose the desired role orientation thereby considering their mission and then find a balance between the above 'extremes'.

In this way socialization not only transmits the culture to the organization's members but it supports the organization's mission as well. 2.2. 2 Stories, ceremonies and organizational language Besides the above mentioned informal way of transmitting cultural norms and values there also exists an informal way of doing this. This is done through the following ceremonial rites: Rites of passage: these are used for allowing new members to learn and internalize the norms and values. Rites of integration: these build and reinforce common bonds between organizational members (for instance office parties). Rites of enhancement: these are used to publicly show recognition to employees and reward them for their (individual) efforts (for instance awards dinners, promotions). 2.3 Where does organizational culture come from?

An organization's culture is developed from the interactions of four factors: personal and professional characteristics of people inside the organization, organizational ethics, property rights that the organization gives to its employees and organizational structure. These four factors interact and form in that way the specific culture for a certain organization. They also cause the culture to change over time. 2.3. 1 Characteristics of people within the organization The first factor to look on when explaining differences in culture should be the people in the organization. Organizations attract, select and retain people who share their specific values, personalities and ethics.

And in a similar way people are attracted by an organization that matches with their values. Over time the (type of) people in an organization will be more similar. Together they form a specific organizational culture that will get more and more distinct from other organization's cultures. The founder has a very important role in forming this culture.

Of course he shapes it with his own values and norms, but he also hires the first employees that often adopt the founder's values and norms. Hence, over time, the founder's values are perpetuated and become rooted in the organization. A good example is Bill Gates: a work-alcoholic with terminal values as innovation and high quality and corresponding instrumental values as hard work, creativity and high standards. He hires people who fit in with these values and expect them to do everything they can to promote innovation and quality, just like he does. Of course there is a danger in the 'similarization' of values and norms.

Organizations become inert and find difficulties to adapt to changing circumstances. A possible solution is to avoid this groupthink by hiring people who share different beliefs and values. 2.3. 2 Organizational Ethics Just like the founder can develop cultural values and member's behaviour to some extent ethical values can be developed similarly. Organizational ethics are "the moral values, beliefs, and rules that establish the appropriate way for organizational stakeholders to deal with one another and with the organization's environment". These values help managers to decide how to act in situations that can be painful for others. The ethics that are embodied in the organizational culture are the product of societal, professional and individual ethics: Societal ethics: Moral values formalized by a legal system, in the practices and in the unwritten norms that people follow in their daily live.

Professional ethics: Moral values developed by a group of similarly trained people, used to control their performance of a task and their use of resources. For instance the "Oath of Hippocrates" for doctors. Individual ethics: Personal moral values used by individuals to structure their interactions with people. 2.3. 2 Property rights The cultural values that are developed in an organization also stem from the specific property rights that are given to its members i.e. the rights to receive and use organizational resources. The shareholders have the strongest property rights as the 'own' the organization. Also the top managers have strong property rights in the form of huge wages, large stock options, rewards and last but not least their power to control and manage the organizational resources.

In most cases the worker's property rights are restricted to their wages they earn and health and pension benefits (in some cases lifetime employment or eligibility for bonuses). The distribution of the property rights to different stakeholders determines, as already mentioned, the culture that emerges in an organization. But next to this it also determines how effective an organization is. The top managers thus have an important role because they set the property rights of the other members. In this way they can influence the culture and the effectiveness of the organization. The difficulty lies in finding the right amount of property rights to give to the workforce.

A wrong amount can cause power struggles and losses of flexibility. One should try to implement a system that assigns property rights in function of performances and in a discriminating manner. This difficult challenge should be continually evaluated and addressed by the managers. 2.3. 4 Organization structure The organization structure is formed by formalized task and authority system that is established to control the organization's activities. Because a different structure causes a different culture to arise, the managers should choose the structure that develops the desired culture.

For instance a strong top-down hierarchy will cause a strongly institutionalised role orientation that for instance restricts the employees and can reduce creativity, innovativeness and flexibility. In this case a more machine-like organization arises. On the contrary organic structures characterized by a flat decentralized system with the principle of mutual adjustment encourage innovations, creativity and flexibility. The organization should try to find a structure that matches the organization's needs and (desired) culture. If the organization succeeds to do this it can create a strong competitive advantage by creating core competencies that are very difficult to imitate. As companies grow and differentiate, they need to pay attention to maintaining their original values as the loss of them can cause to lose their competitive advantage.

2.4 The ethical behaviours and the organizations's social responsibility To develop and follow ethical values in an organization has certain advantages: Regulation of the pursuit of self-interest: Avoid that people within the organization pursue their own goals at the expense of collective goals. Reputation effect: Good ethical behaviour improves reputation. Or vice versa unethical actions can seriously affect an organization's reputation. Shell's reputation was gravely damaged by their dominant, dehumanizing activities in Africa. Cost reduction: No time is wasted to decide if an action is right or not. Although there are good reasons to act in an ethical manner, still many instances of unethical behaviour occur.

Some factors responsible for this are: Lapses in individual ethics: e.g. influence education, family Ruthless pursuit of self-interest Outside pressure The moral responsibility to stakeholder groups that are in some way affected by the organization's actions can be described by social responsibility. There are two different ways of behaving concerning this social responsibility: Narrow stance: Organization follows the existing rules that are created by the society in which it operates. It feels free to interpret the rules in the most favourable way for the organization. Broad stance: The organization accepts to be a 'moral agent' that analyses each encountered situation from an ethical viewpoint. Even when there are no applicable laws it tries to find the best solution for the stakeholders. 3 Summary of "Learning and Self-Organization" In this part of the report Gareth Morgan's (1996) view of the brain as a metaphor for organizational structure and behaviour is summarized.

This strong metaphor is gaining more and more popularity and is still delivering new insights because of new developments in the cognitive science. Contemporary organization theorists share the opinion that it is possible to design learning organizations that function in a similar way as human brains. This implies flexible organizations that can distribute their knowledge and control in order to allow self-organization to occur. In this way the organization can react to and evolve with new emerging challenges. Morgan discusses three major fields that contribute to this metaphor: Information processing: organizations are considered information processing systems.

Creating learning organizations: with help of cybernetics learning organization are created that have the capability to be self-correcting and thus learn. Organization as holographic brains: the organization encodes the whole in all of its parts and uses this property to correct or restore erroneous parts in the system. 3.1 Organizations as information processing brains As we realize more than ever today we are living in an information society. Actually every aspect of organizational functioning depends in some way on information processing. From this view organizations can be considered information systems or decision-making systems. This "decision making" approach was first investigated by Simon in the 50's and made a number of assumptions about human decision making: people never have complete information about possible courses of actions and their consequences people only have limited problem solving capacity people are unable to measure all results accurately The conclusion Simons connected to these results is that individuals settle for a "bounded reality" of "good enough" decisions based on simple "rules of thumb" and limited research.

This works in a similar way for organizations because the people in the same organization transfer these deficits to organizational decisions. Inspired by this, tools for Operations Research, Management Information System and other programs were introduced to quantitatively support decision-making. Although this information processing perspective has created a fresh way of thinking about organization there are two major criticisms: - Information processing view has had a "left-brain bias", and an over centralized view of nature of organizational intelligence. The emphasis was placed on rational, analytical, reductive approaches to information processing and problem solving, reinforcing in some measure the bureaucratic model. - Large emphasis on the limited intelligence of single individuals. This limited intelligence of individuals is used to justify the limited intelligence of organization.

3.2 Complex Learning Organization 3.2. 1 Cybernetics Cybernetics is a term that originates from Greek word kubernetes ( , meaning "steersman". The core insight emerging from cybernetics is that the self-regulating behaviour of a system depends on information exchange involving negative feedback (c. f. : the work of the steersman). Cybernetics stress four key principles that are important to systems: - Systems must have the capacity to sense, monitor and scan significant aspects of their environment. - They must be able to relate this information to the operating norms that guide system behaviour.

- They must be able to detect significant deviations from these norms. - They must be able to initiate corrective action when discrepancies are detected. The combination of these abilities makes it possible for a system to constantly monitor its environment, detect possible deviations from the defined norms and then take the required action to counteract. However, the norms or standards itself are never questioned (single loop learning model). 3.2. 2 Learning Organizations (Learn to Learn) In case the system also takes account for the guiding norms or standards itself and has the possibility to change these than one can speak of double loop learning. More complex cybernetic system such as the human brain works like this.

3.3 Organizations as holographic brains Morgan postulates five principles to show how an organization can be compared to holographic brains: Whole into parts: Just like a holographic picture shows the entire picture in every part, the basic concept of a holographic system is to build "the whole" into "all parts", meaning that every part or subsystem of an organization represents the entire company. Functional redundancy: overcapacity, not by having many extra parts, but by having many functions performed by each of them. This is exactly the opposite as stated by classical organizational theory. At first sight it might seem like wastage but on the other hand it creates a great flexibility. To a certain extent every part can jump in when certain parts fall away en unexpected extra work can be easily dealt with. Necessary variation: all parts of a system must have the same variation and complexity as the environment it is supposed to control A minimum of critical specification: roughly that there has to be some type of formal organization, though it may change rapidly Learning to learn: the ability not only to correct actions to goals, but also to question the goals if necessary (double loop learning).

A good example of this is the small Norwegian shipping company that lost half of its employees, including many managers, in a charter plane crash. After the initial shock had subsided, the organization was able to function very much like before. By pooling their knowledge and creating new organizational structures, the employees were able to reconstruct the functions performed by the people who perished. Although each of the points mentioned covers important issues that have to be thought of when deciding about the structure of a company, there is no single recipe for designing the perfect organization. Every market, every company has specific needs that have to be included. 3.4 Morgan's Conclusion: The strong points of the brain metaphor are: - Increasing our understanding of organizational learning and autonomy - Showing why organizational guidelines should rather be in the form of negative (thou shall not) than positive rules - Showing the possibilities available when organizations break away from the limited rationality of bureaucracies - Providing guidelines for the use of new forms of information technology Limitations mentioned by Morgan: - There is no collective coherent image of the brain.

So metaphors are needed to comprehend implications of this metaphor. - The danger of overlooking the conflicts created between the demands of autonomy and the existing bases of power - The huge changes in personal beliefs and values necessary to implement it cause the change process to take very long. 4 Analysis: As said in the introduction Morgan's metaphor of the brain will be used to look more in depth to an organizational culture, as described by Daft. When comparing the two chapters two interrelated aspects can be found quite easily.

The first one is the organizational structure, that as described is one of the factors of developing a organization's culture and effectiveness, but also is a determining factor for organizations that want to implement 'brain' elements. Generally said a company should structure itself in such a way that matches the specific needs (create a brain-like organization) and (desired) culture. In this way it can realize excellence and have a competitive advantage over its competitors. The second aspect is organizational change. The culture has influence on the organization's effectiveness and is very hard to change. Hence to create an organization as a brain the organization has to realize considerable changes.

If the company want to utilize the advantages of working like a brain the company should reshape the culture in such a way that this will become possible. 4.1 Structure: Let's go back to the shipping company in Norway. Which role has the specific organizational culture in reconstructing the essential functions? Influence of culture? In my opinion the right organizational culture is an important prerequisite for making a successful recovery operation as the shipping company case. As described in Daft the organizational culture is developed and influenced by four different factors that interact with each other.

So actually there should be tried to form all four of these in such a way that the emergence of a brain-like organization is possible. For instance the members should be flexible and innovative and the organizational ethics should allow continuing the business after loss of so many colleagues. Focus on organizational structure In this analysis the focus will be on the structural aspect, although one should keep in mind that this also implies changes in the other three mentioned factors. As Morgan showed in his holographic view on organizations it is important to create some sort of organization's DNA or said in another way to create organizational memory. When looking at for instance a bureaucratic organization, information is collected by the lower ranks, collated and presented by middle management for the top, that bases decisions on it and gives orders back.

In this case the information is not distributed, but kept centrally. The design is more machine-like and so there is almost no organizational memory. If for instance a certain part disappears the whole machine will stop to work. In order to create organizational memory and flexibility towards these situations organizations should strive to develop autonomous teams and decentralize, thereby distributing information and creating a well-spread organizational memory. So a very flat structure is needed in combination with autonomy of the workers. This autonomy should be in such a way that workers, or teams of workers, can be self-learning systems.

Therefore they should satisfy to the principles of cybernetics mentioned by Morgan and should double-loop learning be possible. If a company succeeds in creating such an organization they can quickly react and adopt themselves to changing circumstances, calamities and temporary events. This property is very valuable, as it can become a competitive advantage for the specific company. 4.2 Change: To start this analysis one of the conclusions of the brain metaphor is repeated here: "The huge changes in personal beliefs and values necessary to implement it cause the change process to take very long". As also mentioned by Daft it is very hard to change a settled company culture. A nice illustration is the Proctor & Gamble case where the manager tries to break through the 'similarization' of the workers.

This because the typical P&G culture was responsible for a lot of 'non-value added' activities that started to erode P&G's bottom-line performance. He tried to overcome this old culture with rigorous measures, including firing 13% of P&G's workforce. When Daft's book was printed analysts were still waiting to see what effects these changes had. Is it possible to impose changes? This question keeps on returning in Morgan's book. In the flux and transformation metaphor, where the four change logics are treated, there is given some special attention to this question.

Bottom line is that form always emerges and cannot be designed or controlled. The only thing a manager can do is to create the right 'context' in which the desired changes are possible. Holographic self-organization as a means for change The view mentioned in last paragraph is consistent with the principles of holographic self-organisation. In developing mindsets and skills appropriate for creating this 'context' the managers can benefit from the principles of holographic self-organization. Especially the focus on "limits" and "minimum specs" are very useful for shaping critical parameters that can influence the course of system evolution.

What does this mean for the organization? As we saw the P&G-manager tried to impose a new way of working and culture in a very rigorous manner. Following the brain metaphor (and also the flux and transformation metaphor) it can be concluded that this is the wrong approach. The manager should let the organization change by itself! With help of the principles mentioned in the holographic brains part the manager should create self-organizing subsystems (teams) that have a restricted formal organization and moreover can change rapidly. Change in culture Because of the self-organization and double loop learning capabilities the systems are now self-designing instead of 'designed'.

This means that the working groups need less formal leadership. Besides this these groups often stay together for a long time; determine their own goals and how to achieve these. Due to this long time spent together members are cross-trained to perform the work of the other members as well. To make it possible for these self-organized teams to exist an appropriate culture should be created. As described in the structure analysis the organizational structure has an important role. Besides this people should be motivated to be innovative and creative (e.g. socialization practices) and also given appropriate property rights.

In the long run this means eventually a changed culture for the company. Actually there will be a mosaic of subcultures within the overall company culture, because every self-organized unit will in some way develop an own appropriate subculture. Within the subunit the culture is formed for a great part by the characteristics of the people in that unit together with the specific organization structure. Of course there is the influence of the property rights and ethical organization too, but I expect that these are mostly determined from the aggregated organization level. 5 Conclusion Organizational culture is something intangible that resides in shared values, shared thinking, shared acting and shared beliefs of the members within an organization.

This organizational culture is responsible for the organization's identity and it determines the organization to be 'successful' or a 'failure'. Four different factors where organizational culture comes from can be determined. One of them organizational structure is analysed more in depth with help of the brain metaphor. In order to create an organization that can function as a human brain the right culture is a prerequisite.

When considering the organizational structure there can be said that the company should structure itself in such a manner that it unites the needs for a brain-like organization and an appropriate culture. This means for instance decentralization and autonomous teams. Another aspect that is treated more thoroughly is change. As is shown change cannot just be imposed but emerges. The manager has to create the 'context' in which desired changes are made possible. The holographic approach can be used to reform the organization by introducing self-organizing teams.

The result is a very flexible organization that is capable to deal with unexpected and changing circumstances. By this approach it is possible to gradually let the culture change instead of impose a change by rigorous decisions. Of course, as already mentioned, there are much more aspects that can be analysed in a similar way. In the scope of this report it was not possible to analyse all the important aspects without being too general.

That is why I chose to restrict myself to just the two aspects I considered most important.