Chapter 5 : Cultural Approaches

Summary from Textbook:

This chapter looks at the cultural approach as a metaphor, regarding organizations as cultures. There are two different ways of thinking: culture as something an organization has, and culture as something an organization is.

Several people believe that a companies’ success or failure can be attributed to its cultures within.

Terrence Deal and Allen Kennedy believe that a successful business can be enhanced by the development of a strong and positive culture within, thus improving the workplace and performance of individuals and organizations. The following 4 aspects are key to this:

• Values of the members within the organization


• Heroes that represent the organization’s values


• Rites and rituals of celebrating the organization’s values


• Cultural network through which the values are instituted and reinforced

Tom Peters and Robert Waterman also identified several aspects of successful organizations. They believed the importance of organizational intangibles, such as values and heroes, moving away from the normal rational modes of organizing. However, they also mentioned that these themes could not be used solely to determine the success and failure of a company. These values were:

• A bias for action


• Close relations with the customers


• Autonomy and entrepreneurship


• Productivity through people


• Hands-on and value driven


• Stick to the knitting


• Simple form, lean staff


• Simultaneous loose-tight properties

However, scholars nowadays feel that this is no longer the case, and that cultures were not as simple as it seemed. This was seen through 4 distinctive aspects of culture within the organization: they are complicated, emergent, non-unitary and often ambiguous.

Edgar Schein came up with several ideas about culture. He believed that the human need for stability, consistency and meaning was important, and gave several definitions to culture:

• Culture as a group phenomenon dependent on communication, existing on many different levels, and is often fragmented.


• Patterns of basic assumptions


• Emergent and developmental process


• Highlighting the socializing aspect of it

He further came up with 3 different levels of the various elements of culture:

• Level 1: Artifacts and Behaviours


• Level 2: Espoused Organizational Values


• Level 3: Basic Assumptions of how everything worked

He referred to this as the Onion Model, where Level 3 was encompassed by Level 2, and Level 1 was the outside circle, encircling both levels. An example of a contemporary organizational culture, the high reliability culture, was used to illustrate the intersection of assumptions, values and behaviours.

Methods of analysing organizational cultures were then looked at, and it was found that most researchers believed that qualitative methods were the best way of obtaining an understanding of the complicated, fragmented and changing nature of cultural groups. The results of these observations were then communicated to their audiences through word of mouth.

This chapter highlights the importance of having traditions that are unique to the organization or person. Once a person is integrated into the culture, he will feel a sense of belonging, and will thus improve his work productivity.

Reference:

Miller, K 2009, Organizational Communication: Approaches and Processes, 6^th edition, Belmont, CA, Wadsworth Publishing Company.