Posts Tagged with "organizational-culture-and-leadership"

Reference #406: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture covers "pretty much everything" a group has learnt as it evolved. Culture exists at many levels of observability, arranged roughly as follows from most to least observable:Read more →

Reference #407: Organizational Culture and Leadership

You can define culture as the accumulated shared learning used by a group to solve problems of external adaptation and internal integration — how the group handles change and interacts with the rest of the world, and how the group interacts with itself.Read more →

Reference #408: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Since culture is a product of shared learning, to understand a group's culture you must understand its history.Read more →

Reference #409: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Certain elements of culture cannot be easily changed. These are the basic taken-for-granted assumptions; they are the earliest shared learnings, and they provide meaning and stability.Read more →

Reference #410: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Per Bales (1958), two kinds of leadership are necessary for the long-term performance of problem-solving groups: a task leader, and a social-emotional leader. These are usually different people within the group.Read more →

Reference #411: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture is socio-technical. It solves for issues of internal integration (how the group works together) and external adaptation (strategic, problem-solving). Effective organisations align, if not integrate, the external and internal dimensions.Read more →

Reference #412: Organizational Culture and Leadership

One of the great dangers in culture change efforts is to assume that external issues are separate from culture and instead focus on internal issues. Here, internal issues are the "mechanisms by which a group makes life pleasant for itself".Read more →

Reference #413: Organizational Culture and Leadership

With time and shared learning, culture becomes more than shared behaviour. It becomes a shared way of talking, thinking, and perceiving the world.Read more →

Reference #414: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The concept of culture as a learned phenomenon of a group implies it possesses the following characteristics:Read more →

Reference #415: Organizational Culture and Leadership

New members of a group are taught only surface-level aspects of culture. As they gain permanent member status, they are taught more of the culture. One way to reveal deeper shared assumptions of a group is to observe or interview long-standing group members.Read more →

Reference #416: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture cannot be inferred from behaviour alone. Behaviour is determined both by cultural predisposition and by external environmental circumstances. Only after uncovering and understanding the deeper layers of culture can you say whether a behaviour is or is not an artifact of the culture.Read more →

Reference #417: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Macrocultures are the cultures of nations, ethnic groups, religions, and other kinds of large social units.Read more →

Reference #418: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Cultural learning is mediated by leadership behaviour. For example, a leader may provide (model) a behaviour the group is not exhibiting but should be. Such cultural learning may also occur through a high-power leader, such as a founder, demanding a new behaviour to achieve some purpose.Read more →

Reference #419: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture can be analysed at several different levels of visibility. From most observable to the most deeply embedded, the levels are as follows: artifacts, espoused beliefs and values, and basic underlying assumptions.Read more →

Reference #420: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Artifacts of culture are both easy to observe and difficult to decipher. Without additional information, you will not be able to reconstruct what an artifact means to a group.Read more →

Reference #421: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Your interpretations of an unfamiliar group's artifacts — what you see and feel — are projections of your own cultural background.Read more →

Reference #422: Organizational Culture and Leadership

All group learning comes originally from an individual's beliefs and values on what should be (and the gap between that and reality).Read more →

Reference #423: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Certain beliefs and values can only be confirmed by social validation — that is, the shared social experiences of a group. Consider a system of religious and moral beliefs.Read more →

Reference #424: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Like other beliefs and values, those confirmed through social validation provide comfort and meaning to a group's members. But they may not be correlated with actual performance. They may even be negatively correlated.Read more →

Reference #425: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Espoused values and behaviours in an organisation often reflect desired behaviour. Yet there is often a gap between desired behaviour and observed behaviour. To get a fuller picture of culture and correctly predict future behaviour, you must understand the basic underlying assumptions.Read more →

Reference #426: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Basic group assumptions generally cannot be confronted or debated. Hence they are difficult to change.Read more →

Reference #427: Organizational Culture and Leadership

When we re-examine our basic assumptions, we destabilise our world and in doing so create anxiety. Rather than tolerate this anxiety, we tend to lie to ourselves about what is happening around us. This makes the world more congruent with our assumptions.Read more →

Reference #428: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Your assumptions guide your interpretation of the world.Read more →

Reference #429: Organizational Culture and Leadership

When dealing with someone whose cultural assumptions differ and conflict with yours, the solution is not to declare either party's cultural assumptions "wrong". Instead, aim to find a third cultural assumption congruent with both parties.Read more →

Reference #430: Organizational Culture and Leadership

O'Reilly and Tushman (2016) found that the long-term survival of an organisation hinges on two factors. Can the organisation to manage its existing, currently successful business? And can it concurrently develop a new business that is responsive to changing environmental conditions?Read more →

Reference #431: Organizational Culture and Leadership

To change culture, leaders must have a detailed understanding of their culture. They must especially be able to identify the stable elements that have been the source of the company's success.Read more →

Reference #432: Organizational Culture and Leadership

A mature organisation differs from a growing startup in many ways:Read more →

Reference #433: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture is morally neutral. Despite what our cultural prejudices may tell us, there is no inherently right or wrong way to do things.Read more →

Reference #434: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Organisational culture often reflects both the originating national macroculture and the underlying technology of the business. It cannot be understood without looking at the macrocultural contexts in which the organisation exists.Read more →

Reference #435: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Guanxi is the Chinese philosophy of building trusted connections that can be used in the future.Read more →

Reference #436: Organizational Culture and Leadership

In his 2001 study, Hofstede surveyed IBM employees across all nations in which they had offices. He identified six dimensions of culture across which nations can be compared:Read more →

Reference #437: Organizational Culture and Leadership

All societies value both individuals and groups, in that neither make sense without the other. Yet cultures differ dramatically to the extent their espoused norms and values reflect deeper assumptions.Read more →

Reference #438: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Individualistic societies place high value on personal accomplishment and ambition, condone personal competition, and define intimacy and love in personal terms.Read more →

Reference #439: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Power distance is the degree to which people in a hierarchical situation perceive a gap in social and psychological status. It is also the perceived difference in ability to control each other's behaviour.Read more →

Reference #440: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The 2004 Globe study of culture derived nine basic dimensions of culture:Read more →

Reference #441: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Languages (and the culture of the language users) fall on a spectrum of "high context" to "low context". In a high context language, a word or phrase can be more difficult to interpret since its meaning depends on context.Read more →

Reference #442: Organizational Culture and Leadership

England (1975) found, when comparing managerial values across different countries, that managers tended to be either pragmatic or moralistic. Americans were often pragmatic managers who seek validation of an approach in their own experience.Read more →

Reference #443: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Every culture has a basic time orientation toward the past, present, or future. Anglo-Americans have been found to primarily orient toward the near future, while the Japanese sit at the extreme of long-range planning. Time orientation also affects organisations. U.S.Read more →

Reference #444: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Cultures view time on a spectrum from monochronic to polychronic. Most managers in the U.S. have a monochronic view of time. Time is viewed as an infinitely divisible linear ribbon that can be divided into compartments. Within each compartment of time, only one activity can be performed.Read more →

Reference #445: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Animals have a clearly defined flight distance and critical distance. When intruded upon at these distances, an animal will respectively flee or display aggressive behaviour.Read more →

Reference #446: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Cultural assumptions about time affect how space is arranged. For example, monochromatic time is linked to efficiency and so space is arranged to minimise wasted time.Read more →

Reference #447: Organizational Culture and Leadership

At least in the United States, assumptions about the fundamental motivation of workers made by leaders has changed over time. The transition has been:Read more →

Reference #448: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Humans relate to their environment in one of several orientations — "doing", "being", and "being-in-becoming".Read more →

Reference #449: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Every macroculture has assumptions about how individuals should relate to each other. These are manifest as levels of relationships in society, as follows:Read more →

Reference #450: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Within the work context, you can define relationships as Level 1 formal transactions or as Level 2 personalised relationships. You can move to Level 2 by opening up or by asking personal questions.Read more →

Reference #451: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The Level 1 norms of politeness, tact, and face-saving exist as a way to make society possible.Read more →

Reference #452: Organizational Culture and Leadership

One approach to handling multicultural issues in a group is to focus on "cultural intelligence". This concept proposes that building understanding, empathy, and the ability to work with other cultures requires four capacities:Read more →

Reference #453: Organizational Culture and Leadership

A "cultural island" is a situation in which the rules of having to maintain face are temporarily suspended. Here, a group is allowed to explore its own values and assumptions freely, especially those around authority and intimacy.Read more →

Reference #454: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Dialogue is fundamentally different from discussion. In discussion, your goal is often to solve problems quickly and try to win arguments. Dialogue slows down the conversation to allow you to examine your assumptions and reflect on what you say and hear.Read more →

Reference #455: Organizational Culture and Leadership

"Talking to the campfire" is a form of dialogue derived from native cultures. Some cultures engage in dialogue by gathering around and talking to a campfire rather than to each other. The absence of eye contact facilitates the suspension of reactions or objections.Read more →

Reference #456: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Effective dialogue requires suspension by its participants. This is enabled through rules imposed by the conversational process: not interrupting, talking to the campfire fire rather than to each other, limiting eye contact, and starting with a "check-in".Read more →

Reference #457: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Reflective conversation leads to better listening. You are more likely to understand the meaning in the words of others if you have identified your own assumptions.Read more →

Reference #458: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Dialogue personalise cultural issues. This is especially true for dialogue with check-ins and conversations on critical issues of culture such as authority and intimacy. When you talk only about generalisations of countries and how their culture has evolved, your conversation is often transactional.Read more →

Reference #459: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Cultural misunderstanding can across levels of organisational hierarchy, even where the same macrocultures are shared. Going down the hierarchy, the miscommunication mainly results from misunderstood instructions. Going up the hierarchy, the main misunderstanding comes from lost information.Read more →

Reference #460: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Procedures and checklists can function as cultural islands. Going through such a list is a culturally neutral process.Read more →

Reference #461: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Many organisational issues — especially safety issues in high-hazard industries and healthcare — are caused by poor cross-cultural communication.Read more →

Reference #462: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Leadership is the management of culture. The role of a leader with respect to culture varies with the stage of growth of an organisation.Read more →

Reference #463: Organizational Culture and Leadership

A model for the stages of group evolution was summarised by 1956 by Bennis & Shepard, then described "poetically" by Tuckman in 1965 as forming, storming, norming, and performing.Read more →

Reference #464: Organizational Culture and Leadership

When a group realises (or has their leader point out) that their strength comes not from homogeneity but from variety, they move from norming to performing.Read more →

Reference #465: Organizational Culture and Leadership

A role of leadership is to make changes. If those changes produce success for a group, its culture evolves and survives. But if the changes aren't adopted, or they are but don't lead to success, the result is "failed leadership". We only call this behaviour leadership when it succeeds.Read more →

Reference #466: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Founding acts of leadership must fit the macroculture in which a group operates. A founder succeeds only when their acts fits within the existing cultural conditions.Read more →

Reference #467: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The theory of management of Ken Olsen, founder of DEC, held that groups could make decisions, but individuals must be responsible and accountable for those decisions.Read more →

Reference #468: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Assumptions that work well under one set of circumstances may become dysfunctional in other circumstances.Read more →

Reference #469: Organizational Culture and Leadership

While frequent, it is not a given that founders automatically impose their assumptions on the organisations they create. It is possible for a founder to create an organisation that does not depend on her beliefs and values. This depends on the founder's needs to externalise her assumptions.Read more →

Reference #470: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Every group has to go through Tuckman's stages of group development. They must answer questions of inclusion, identify, authority, and intimacy.Read more →

Reference #471: Organizational Culture and Leadership

An organisation is a socio-technical system. How it deals with survival in the external environmental, and how it organisations itself internally to deal with human problems of integration, are equally part of its culture. These problems are highly interconnected.Read more →

Reference #472: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Most organisations have multiple functions, reflecting multiple stakeholders. Some come from espoused values and are called "manifest functions". Others are unspoken and arise from shared taken-for-granted assumptions, called "latent functions".Read more →

Reference #473: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Strategy must consider and make sense within its organisation's culture. Shared assumptions about an organisation's identity are important elements of culture, and so limit strategic options. A strategy must be consistent with the organisation's assumptions about itself.Read more →

Reference #474: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The "niceties" of social life — manners and morals, politeness, and tact — are in fact essential rules for keeping a social society intact. An important concept in this understanding is "face": a self-image of who we are, along with a degree of self-esteem.Read more →

Reference #475: Organizational Culture and Leadership

There are six primary mechanisms through which leaders embed their beliefs, values, and assumptions in an organisation:Read more →

Reference #476: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The mechanisms through which leaders primarily embed their beliefs — and in so doing teach their organisation how to perceive, think, feel, and behave — directly create the "climate" of that organisation.Read more →

Reference #477: Organizational Culture and Leadership

In addition to the six primary mechanisms by which leaders embed their beliefs, values, and assumptions in an organisation, there are also six secondary reinforcement and stabilising mechanisms:Read more →

Reference #478: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The most powerful mechanism a leader has for communicating what she cares about is systematically paying attention to it.Read more →

Reference #479: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Among other functions, organisational systems and procedures make life predictable for members of that organisation. They relieve ambiguity and anxiety. Systems lend structure to an otherwise ambiguous organisational world.Read more →

Reference #480: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Whereas in the founding stage of an organisation, leaders create culture, in more mature organisations they are constrained by culture.Read more →

Reference #481: Organizational Culture and Leadership

That certain groups are slow to adopt new technology may be due to strong cultural forces. For example, a doctor may refuse to use a keyboard and computer as their use reduces her eye-to-eye contact with patients.Read more →

Reference #482: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Among other subcultures, every organisation contains three generic subcultures: operators, designers, and executives. Without explicit management, misalignment and conflict may arise between these subcultures as they have different functions and face different environmental problems.Read more →

Reference #483: Organizational Culture and Leadership

The executive subculture is unique among the generic organisational subcultures in having to manage other functions. Its members must hence understand and manage the culture of those functions. They must manage other subcultures.Read more →

Reference #484: Organizational Culture and Leadership

In an organisation's early stage, the emphasis of culture is on differentiating that organisation from its environment. It is the psychosocial "glue" that holds the organisation together and gives its members identity.Read more →

Reference #485: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Absent major external stressors, and if the founder remains for a long time, early stage company culture evolves in small increments by assimilating what works well. This occurs through two basic processes: general evolution and specific evolution.Read more →

Reference #486: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Leaders in early-stage organisations can affect culture change by systematically promoting insiders whose core assumptions align better with the culture the leadership is trying to move towards than the status quo.Read more →

Reference #487: Organizational Culture and Leadership

When a mid-stage company whose founder has moved on is faced with a crisis (as slipping performance or an acquisition), a new executive leader is often brought in. This leader can fail in three ways:Read more →

Reference #488: Organizational Culture and Leadership

Culture serves different functions over an organisation's lifecycle. Leader therefore must consider different issues of culture change at each stage.Read more →

Reference #489: Organizational Culture and Leadership

If you seek to learn about an organisation's culture, an effective approach is to act as a helper or in a consultant role. Members may see researchers as outsider and hence not give an accurate picture of culture — for example, by exaggerating to impress you, or by hiding information.Read more →

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