How To Manage Organiztional Culture

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Organizational culture grows out of informal and unofficial ways of doing things. It influences the formal organization by shaping the way employees perceive and react to formally defined jobs and structural arrangements. For example, in a company that promotes the Protestant work ethic, the idea that working hard is the way to get ahead in life, employees are led to view their jobs as critical to personal success and therefore as important, interesting, challenging and in other ways worthwhile. By encouraging employees to perceive success as something to be valued and pursued, these norms also encourage the developments of a need for achievement and motivate hard work and high productivity. Cultural norms and values convey social information that can influence the way people choose to behave on the job. They do so by affecting the way employees perceive themselves, their work and the organization.

Can organizational culture be managed? It might seem that the answer to this question should be no for any of the following reasons:

1. Cultures are so spontaneous, elusive and hidden that they cannot be accurately diagnosed or intentionally changed.
2. Considerable experience and deep personal insight are required to truly understand an organization's culture, making management infeasible in most instances
3. There may be several subcultures in a single organizational culture complicating the task of managing organizational culture to the point where it becomes impossible.
4. Cultures provide organization members with continuity and stability. Therefore members are likely to resist even modest efforts at cultural management or change because they fear discontinuity and instability.

Many organizational behavior experts disagree with these arguments however and suggest that organizational cultures can be managed through the use of the approaches discussed next.

In one approach, symbolic management managers attempt to influence deep cultural norms and values by shaping the surface cultural elements such as symbols stories and ceremonies that people use to express and transmit cultural understandings. Managers can accomplish shaping of this sort in a number of ways. They can issue public statements about their vision for the future of the company. They can recount stories about themselves and the company. They can use and enrich the shared company's language. In this way, managers not only communicate the company's central norms and key values but devise new ways of expressing them.

Managers who practice symbolic management realize that every managerial behavior broadcasts a message to employees about the norms and values of the organization. They consciously choose to do specific things that will symbolize and strengthen a desirable culture. For example, deciding to promote from within and avoid hiring people from outside the firm sends employees the message that strong performance is rewarded by career advancement. This message reinforce cultural norms and values that favor hard work.



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