Answer the following seven questions separately. In your own words, identify and discuss the main argument (also known as a thesis or line of reasoning) presented in this article (200 words

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE

What Is Organizational

Culture? And Why Should

We Care? by Michael D. Watkins

MAY

If you want to provoke a vigorous debate, start a conversation on organizational culture. While there

is universal agreement that (1) it exists, and (2) that it plays a crucial role in shaping behavior in

organizations, there is little consensus on what organizational culture actually is, never mind how it

influences behavior and whether it is something leaders can change.

This is a problem, because without a reasonable

definition (or definitions) of culture, we cannot hope

to understand its connections to other key elements of the organization, such as structure and incentive systems. Nor can we develop good approaches to analyzing, preserving and transforming

cultures. If we can

define what organizational culture is, it gives us a handle on how to diagnose

problems and even to design and develop better cultures.

Beginning May 1, 2013, I facilitated a discussion around this question on LinkedIn. The more than 300

responses included rich and varied perspectives and opinions on organizational culture, its meaning

and importance. I include several distinctive views below, illustrated by direct quotes from the LinkedIn discussion thread and then I

er my own synthesis of these views. (There often were

multiple postings with similar themes, so these are simply early selections; unfortunately it was not

possible to acknowledge everyone who made helpful contributions.)

Culture is how organizations ‘do things’ Robbie Katanga

Culture is consistent, observable patterns of behavior in organizations. Aristotle said, “We are what

we repeatedly do.” This view elevates repeated behavior or habits as the core of culture and

deemphasizes what people feel, think or believe. It also focuses our attention on the forces that

COPYRIGHT HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. shape behavior in organizations, and so highlights an important question: are all those forces(including structure, processes, and incentives) “culture” or is culture simply the behavioral outputs?

In large part, culture is a product of compensation Alec Haverstick

Culture is powerfully shaped by incentives. The best predictor of what people will do is what they are incentivized to do. By incentives, we mean here the full set of incentives monetary rewards, non-

monetary rewards such as status, recognition and advancement, and sanctions to which members

of the organization are subject. But where do incentives come from? As with the previous

definition,

there are potential chicken-and-egg issues. Are patterns of behavior the product of incentives, or

have incentives been shaped in fundamental ways by beliefs and values that underpin the culture?

Organizational culture

d nes a jointly shared description of an organization from within

Bruce Perron

Culture is a process of “sense-making” in organizations. Sense-making has been

defined as “a

collaborative process of creating shared awareness and understanding out of

d erent individual

perspectives and varied interests.” Note that this moves the

definition of culture beyond patterns of

behavior into the realm of jointly-held beliefs and interpretations about “what is.” It says that a crucial purpose of culture is to help orient its members to “reality” in ways that provide a basis for

alignment of purpose and shared action.

Organizational culture is the sum of values and rituals which serve as ‘glue’ to integrate the

members of the organization Richard Perrin

Culture is a carrier of meaning. Cultures provide not only a shared view of “what is” but also of “why

is.” In this view, culture is about “the story” in which people in the organization are embedded, and

the values and rituals that reinforce that narrative. It also focuses attention on the importance of

symbols and the need to understand them including the idiosyncratic languages used in

organizations in order to understand culture.

Organizational culture is civilization in the workplace Alan Adler

Culture is a social control system. Here the focus is the role of culture in promoting and reinforcing

“right” thinking and behaving, and sanctioning “wrong” thinking and behaving. Key in this

definition of culture is the idea of behavioral “norms” that must be upheld, and associated social

sanctions that are imposed on those who do t “stay within the lines.” This view also focuses

attention on how the evolution of the organization shaped the culture. That is, how have the existing norms promoted the survival of the organization in the past? Note: implicit in this evolutionary viewis the idea that established cultures can become impediments to survival when there are substantialenvironmental changes.

Culture is a form of protection that has evolved from situational pressures. It prevents “wrong thinking” and “wrong people” from entering the organization in the

first place. It says that

organizational culture functions much like the human immune system in preventing viruses and bacteria from taking hold and damaging the body. The problem, of course, is that organizational

immune systems also can attack agents of needed change, and this has important implications for on-

boarding and integrating people into organizations.

In the discussion, there were also some important observations pushing against the view of culture as something that it is unitary and static, and toward a view that cultures are multiple, overlapping, and

dynamic.

Organizational culture [is shaped by] the main culture of the society we live in, albeit with greater

emphasis on particular parts of it Elizabeth Skringar

Organizational culture is shaped by and overlaps with other cultures especially the broader culture

of the societies in which it operates. This observation highlights the challenges that global

organizations face in establishing and maintaining a

unified culture when operating in the context of

multiple national, regional and local cultures. How should leaders strike the right balance between

promoting “one culture” in the organization, while still allowing for

influences of local cultures?

It over

simpl es the situation in large organizations to assume there is only one cultur and it’s

risky for new leaders to ignore the sub-cultures Rolf Winkler

The cultures of organizations are never monolithic. There are many factors that drive internal variations in the culture of business functions (e.g.

finance vs. marketing) and units (e.g. a fast-

moving consumer products division vs. a pharmaceuticals division of a

diversified firm). A

compan s history of acquisition also

figures importantly in defining its culture and sub-cultures.

Depending on how acquisition and integration are managed, the legacy cultures of acquired units can persist for surprisingly long periods of time.

An organization [is] a living cultur that can adapt to the reality as fast as possible Abdi

Osman Jama

Finally, cultures are dynamic. They shift, incrementally and constantly, in response to external and internal changes. So, trying to assess organizational culture is complicated by the reality that you aretrying to hit a moving target. But it also opens the possibility that culture change can be managed as acontinuous process rather than through big shifts (often in response to crises). Likewise, it highlights

the idea that a stable “destination” may never indeed should never be reached. The culture of

the organization should always be learning and developing.

COPYRIGHT HARVARD BUSINESS SCHOOL PUBLISHING CORPORATION. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. These perspectives provide the kind of holistic, nuanced view of organizational culture that isneeded by leaders in order to truly understand their organizations and to have any hope ofchanging them for the better.Michael D. Watkins is a professor at IMD, a cofounder of Genesis Advisers , and the author of The First 90 Days (Harvard

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