Building Organization Culture

Dr. Hina Juneja

 Organization Culture

• Culture refers to the set of values, dominant beliefs, and guiding norms of
people.
• It denotes a set of important understandings or ‘mental programmes’
implicitly shared by the members of a community.
• The culture of an organization, analogously, refers to the shared values,
norms, beliefs, and understandings of its members.
• It serves to strengthen and integrate its strategy, policies, structure,
operations, and performance.
 Organization Culture

• A strong and integrative culture provides the basis for the productive élan and
ethos of an organization.
• A confused, dissonant, disruptive, and narrow value system, on the other hand,
is reflected in the form of internal disharmony, low productivity, poor work
ethics, weak morale, and very low performance.
 The Culture of Excellent Companies

• ‘Excellent’ companies are obsessed by their concern for being the best in terms of
quality, reliability, customer service and employees’ performance.
• This concern is diffused throughout these organizations.
• They find expression in the form of myths, legends, anecdotes, a sense of pride,
excitement and achievement orientation pervading the enterprises.
 The Culture of Excellent Companies

Such culture is best built by management sharing with the employees

• the goals and mission of the organization,
• the opportunities and threats faced by the enterprise,
• its current operating problems,
• by encouraging the people to come up with suggestions and
• take initiative in solving problems.
 The Culture of Excellent Companies

Top managers in an innovative firm serve as exemplars and role models for the
young.
They inspire others through :
• their achievement drive,
• their creative, competent and knowledge-based approach towards persons and
problems
• their ability, dedication and hard work.
 The Culture of Excellent Companies

The role of managers is crucial in the development and institutionalization of

organizational culture.
Managers as leaders shape the content of organizational culture through their
creation of
• symbols,
• ideologies,
• language,
• beliefs,
• rituals and
• myths.
 The Culture of Excellent Companies

Organizations are viewed as “systems composed of ideas, the meanings of which

must be managed”.
The adoption of a unique and inspiring mission by the organization also serves to
foster an innovative culture.
 The Content of Culture
(Peters and Waterman, 1982)

1 A belief in being the best

2 A belief in the importance of the details of execution
3 A belief in the importance of people as individuals
4 A belief in superior quality and service
A belief that most members of the organization should be innovators
5
- and its consequence, a willingness to support failure
6 A belief in the importance of informality to enhance communication
An explicit belief in, and recognition of the importance of economic
7
growth and profits
 The Essence of an Organization Culture of Creativity and
Excellence
(Rastogi, 1986, 1988)
1. A high orientation towards work excellence among the organization’s members
at all levels.
2. A high orientation towards duty among the organization’s members for
attaining the goals of the organization.
3. A high orientation towards cooperation among the organization’s members in
the performance of their tasks, based on mutual trust and regard.

If these orientations are not widely shared by the personnel of an organization, it

cannot move towards sustained high performance based on creativity, excellence
and innovative achievement.
 Culture Building

The management of an enterprise creates, sustains and strengthens a creative

organizational culture by:
• Creating, diffusing and sharing a vision of the organization’s mission and future
• Communicating openly, clearly and persuasively towards securing and
sustaining shared perceptions and understanding
• Providing an environment of supportive and authentic interpersonal
relationships
• Encouraging and coaching towards high standards of achievement and
performance
 Culture Building

• Praising and recognizing accomplishments through symbols, rituals and

ceremonials
• Resolving conflicts skillfully through accumulated resources of mutual trust,
goodwill and respect
• Tolerating failures and praising the dedicated work involved in the failed efforts
• Balancing uncompromising standards and high expectations with sympathy,
understanding
• Help reconciling creativity with resource constraints
• Matching breadth of vision with attention to detail
 Culture Building

• Organization culture provides the benevolent ambience within which

technovative individuals are enabled to arrange the creative process by
organizing the flow of communication, resources, and cooperation around it.
• A strong and integrative culture, supportive of inherent risk and failure
associated with technovation, is the foremost condition of an organization’s
effective steering of the process.
 Managerial Style and Practices Supportive of Creativity

• Apart from a supportive culture, and innovation-oriented firm requires a

distinctive management style and organizational practices that create, sustain
and reinforce the creativity in individuals.
 Managerial Style and Practices Supportive of Creativity

Research (Kao, 1989) in this area indicates that the management style and practices
should:
• Create an open, decentralized organizational structure
• Support a culture which provides leverage for creative experimentation
• Encourage experimental attitudes
• Circulate success stories
• Emphasize the role of the project/product champion
• Provide the freedom to fail
• Stress effective communication at all levels
• Make resources available for new initiatives
 Managerial Style and Practices Supportive of Creativity

• Ensure that new ideas cannot be easily killed

• Remove bureaucracy from resource allocation
• Provide appropriate financial and non-financial rewards for success
• Ensure a corporate culture which supports risk-taking and questioning
• Minimize administrative interference
• Provide freedom from surveillance and evaluation
• Loosen deadlines
• Delegate responsibility for initiating new activity
 Managerial Style and Practices Supportive of Creativity

Visionary executives follow these managerial styles and practices. Their role in
managing innovation and building and energizing a supportive culture are given
by Tushman and Nadler, 1986.
1. Visionary executives provide a clear direction for their organizations and infuse
them with energy and value.
2. They are champions of change involving technovation.
3. They build executive teams with appropriate technical, social and conceptual
skills to take on diverse tasks.
 Managerial Style and Practices Supportive of Creativity

4. They display three types of behaviours:

1) They work actively on envisioning or articulating a credible yet exciting
vision of the future
2) They personally work on energizing the organization by demonstrating their
own excitement, optimism and enthusiasm
3) They put effort into enabling required behaviour by providing resources,
rewarding desired behaviour, building supportive organizational structures
and processes, and by building an effective senior team.
 Managerial Style and Practices Supportive of Creativity

• Creative and visionary executives function more as leaders than as managers.

• They not only motivate employees but also empower them to act in fulfilling the
shared vision and purpose of organizational excellence and achievement.
• Moreover, they deal with the various strategic issues in the management of
innovation.
 Strategic Issues and Company Culture (C.R.E.A.T.I.V.E.)
(Miller, 1987)
C = Collaboration and Communication
How do people work together and communicate across department lines and within
project teams?

R = Roles, Risks and Rewards

Who are the best initiators and implementers of new ideas, and how do they work
best?

E = Environmental Monitoring
What trends and events signal threats and opportunities, and how is this information
spread throughout the organization?

A = Administration
How is innovation supported by the following systems: budget and accounting,
information management, performance appraisal, reporting structure and innovation
process (steps)?
 Strategic Issues and Company Culture (C.R.E.A.T.I.V.E.)
(Miller, 1987)
T = Transition Management
How are changes in organizational life planned, placed, communicated and
implemented?

I = Intuition and Logic

How are intuition and logic honored and utilized in defining problems, generating
solutions and making decisions?

V = Vision and Purpose

How do people agree with and unite around a central sense of purpose and vision and
the resultant priorities for innovation?

E = Evaluation Methods
How are ideas evaluated - by what criteria and process – at various stages?
 Strategic Issues and Company Culture (C.R.E.A.T.I.V.E.)
(Miller, 1987)

• These eight strategic issues (C.R.E.A.T.I.V.E.) bring out the forms and elements
of creativity and culture in organizations as the basic necessary conditions for
the pursuit of technovation.
• The synergy of these forms and elements produces an organization capable of
responding to the challenge of change and generating and acting upon creative
new ideas from every level.
 Culture and Constructive Contention

1. Organization-wide shared values, norms and beliefs do not, however imply the
absence of divergent opinions and differing viewpoints.
2. An open and strong culture supportive of creativity and innovation encourages
constructive contention in discussion towards decisions and actions.
3. It fosters an intellectual climate in which differing views and opinions are
actually sought and seriously considered.
 Culture and Constructive Contention

4. Culture helps to bring discussion to a close in a timely manner.

5. The decisions reached after a rigorous consideration of contrary viewpoints are
much richer and better in terms of their knowledge inputs.
6. Constructive contention denotes a company’s willingness to continually re-
examine critically those assumptions and beliefs which may seriously impair its
creative approach to problem-solving.
 Culture and Organizational Flexibility

• The capacity of an organization to design, steer and change itself effectively

depends on the strength of its culture.
• The strength and vitality of shared values and beliefs needs to be monitored and
examined periodically in the interest of sustaining and reinforcing the
organization’s innovative and creative élan.
• More importantly, the values and beliefs themselves may also need to be
examined in order to assess their relevance for and congruence with the
requirements of far-reaching or radical changes - environmental shifts and
discontinuities.
 Culture and Organizational Flexibility

• Failure to undertake such a critical examination may lead to ‘vision trap’- entrap
an organization in the images and visions of its past successes, which may blind
the organization to harsh realities of the present and to emerging competitive
pressures and the compulsions of the immediate and near future.
Example: Failure of IBM to respond to the growing challenge of PCs is traced to the
closed mind-set of its decision makers, caused by the images and visions of its past
successes in the area of large computers.
 Culture and Organizational Flexibility

• For the purpose of monitoring shared values and examining their relevance and
‘fit’ to changing competitive scenarios, the management of a firm needs to focus
periodically on a set of questions about organizational values.
• They are divided into two sets:
1. Focuses on the strength and spread of current values and beliefs
2. The nature and relevance in the context of changing competitive conditions
and scenarios.
 1. Monitoring Current Values and Beliefs across the
Organization

• What are our strongly shared values/beliefs?

• Do organizational policies and practices, decisions and actions, reflect these
values consistently and appropriately?
• How widely are these values/beliefs shared through our organization? Are they
equally strong across positions and role, worksites and groups?
• Do our organizational values/beliefs provide our human resources with a sense
of meaning?
• Do our shared values/beliefs empower our people? Do they sustain motivation
and commitment?
• How have we been propagating and strengthening these values through
programmes of communication, training, small group activities and so on.
 2. Examining the Competitive Relevance of Values and
Beliefs

• Do our shared values and beliefs lock us into mixed mindset?

• Do our shared values and beliefs block our perception of emerging realities?
• Do our shared values and beliefs facilitate or impede our fashioning and
implementation of a new vision?
• Will our shared values and beliefs provide support for our competitiveness in the
context of changes in our industry, products and markets?
• Do or will our shared values and beliefs impede the formation or effective
working of our strategic alliances and networks?
 2. Examining the Competitive Relevance of Values and
Beliefs

• Do we need to modify any existing values or emphasize one or more of the new
ones in the context of:
– The emerging shifts and discontinuities in the firm’s competitive environment
– The new or changing needs of the organization’s human resources?
• Can we identify and define the requirements of change in our existing values and
beliefs?
• Can we initiate and implement effectively the required changes in existing values
and beliefs?
• Can we create a new set of shared values and beliefs?
 Subjective Culture of Creativity and Innovation

• Along with the objective dimensions, the strength of an organization’s culture

can however, be properly appraised only in terms of the subjective perception
and motivation of its members.
• The objective and subjective dimensions of culture tend to match each other in
terms of their mutual consistency and complementarity.
• For this purpose, the subjective mental maps of individuals need to be accessed.
 Themes of Perception/Motivation Strength

1 I feel stimulated to be productive and innovative/creative 0 - 10

I believe my creative contribution would be duly

2 0 - 10
recognized and rewarded

3 The new ideas I come up with receive proper attention 0 - 10

I receive detailed and constructive feedback towards

4 0 - 10
improving my work
I find the work environment congenial and achievement-
5 0 - 10
oriented

I get opportunities to upgrade my work skills and master

6 0 - 10
the relevant techniques to my interest(s)

Total Score
 Subjective Culture of Creativity and Innovation

• If periodic representative sample surveys of individuals across various sections

and work groups in an organization consistently show positive responses, the
organization culture may be deemed to be viably established.
• If the individual scores on the strength of various items also show a consistent
increase over time, the organization culture may then be adjudged as becoming
stronger.
 The Role of Managerial Leadership

The role and requirement of managerial leadership for building and energizing an
organization’s culture and aligning it with its technology and competitive
strategies are extremely vital.
• Leader-managers are responsible for creating and sustaining a compelling and
result-oriented vision of their organization’s future.
• They create shared meanings, symbols and images through communication
which galvanize the system, induce enthusiasm and reinforce commitment.
 The Role of Managerial Leadership

• Their role and behaviour exemplify grand ideals and they are powerful role
models of teacher, mentor, coach or guide.
• They create change and unleash the motivation, talent and creativity of the firm’s
human resources.
Therefore, the foremost requirement, responsibility and priority of a leader-
manager is to create and catalyze a clear and shared vision for the organization
and further secure a commitment to a sustained pursuit of that vision.
 The Nature and Role of Vision

• A vision embodies core values and beliefs that drive organizational purpose and
mission.
• Core values and beliefs constitute
– Guiding principles, tenets, and a philosophy of business and life.
– They represent an extension of the personal core values and beliefs of the
leaders of the organization.
 The Nature and Role of Vision

The purpose represents the

• Fundamental reason for the organization’s existence.
• It grows out of the core values.
• It is like a guiding star, always worked towards, but never attained.

Mission denotes a
• Bold, compelling goal.
• It has a clear defined terminal point and a specific time frame.
• Once mission is completed, a new one is set.
 The Nature and Role of Vision

When these core values, beliefs, purpose and mission are clearly understood and
widely shared throughout the organization, they stimulate a powerful culture of
productivity, innovation and excellence that suffuses the organization i.e., the
leader builds the culture.
 The Nature and Role of Vision

The culture in turn, exercises

• A centrally directive influence on the nature, formulation and implementation of
the company’s strategy and on the tactics utilized by it in the implementation of
its strategy.
• A pervasive influence on the organization’s structure, methods, systems,
managerial style, motivation and morale.
Four Primary Benefits of Organizational Vision (Collins
and Lazier, 1992)

1 Vision forms the basis of extraordinary human effort

2 Vision provides a context for strategic and tactical decisions

3 Shared vision creates cohesion, teamwork and community

Vision lays the groundwork for the company to evolve past

4
dependence on a few key individuals.
 The Nature and Role of Vision

Vision and culture, values and beliefs, leadership and managerial style are “soft”
and intangible elements. The “hard” results of technology management, that is
sustained excellence in productivity and technological development cannot be
attained and retained without them.