7- to 10-slide presentation with visuals and speaker notes to the leadership of the organization
mrharrison
order_154260_418555.pptxOrganization Culture
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University Affiliation
Collaboration Warm-Up Exercise
Boin, et al. (2008) assess Columbia Accident Investigation Board critic of NASA’s safety culture who determine that NASA did not have organizational characteristics to prevent disasters like the 2003 Columbia space shuttle demise.
Boin, et al., (2008) indicate that NASA has never been a highly reliable organization and it is unfair to judge it as one. NASA should be seek reliability. Reliability can be assessed under production, time pressures, safety concerns, substantial technical uncertainties, media uncertainties, and efficiency concerns.
Collaboration facilitates open communication with team members leading to the raising of objections and issues in the change-initiative process.
Columbia Accident Investigation Board findings on NASA’s security culture include
Flawed decision making
Broken safety culture
NASA’s approach to safety indicates that decision-making is approached on the basis of hard science (no room for gut feelings). This is achieved through protocols and procedures to guide the process.
collaboration increases trust and builds a shared message within the organization.
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Exercise Objectives
NASA’s culture of production: and NASA’s political/economic environment. Being a politically vulnerable agency, NASA is dependent on Congress and the White House for budgetary and goal approval.
Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) provides recommendations/ directions that NASA’s organizational culture should be altered but fail to provide specific directions for changing the culture.
NESC assesses recurring anomalies in the engineering decisions that indicated they had not effect on flight safety. This culture is aligned to NASA’s organizational culture on safety and integrity (NASA Cultures).
NESC is involved in reviewing problem dispositions, looking for missed signals, creating a common database, and conducting investigative and corrective action.
NASA is influenced by political components. After the Columbia accident, the Bush administration supported the continuation of the space shuttle program but there were insufficient funds to make changes needed for the shuttle to return to normal flight.
After the Columbia accident NASA created the new NASA Engineering and Safety Center (NESC) as a safety resource for engineering choices within the organization.
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Challenge
CAIB provided the need for organizational change at NASA. The objective was to transform NASA’s organizational and safety culture.
The emphasis of organizational and cultural change was on safety climate and culture agency-wide.
BST identified needs for improvement in NASA’s culture which was deficient in core values of safety, people, excellence, and integrity.
The aim of NASA’s cultural change was to foster cultural integrity.
Cultural change is to address existent leaders and instil agency values of the desired culture.
BST was tasked with provisioning an assessment of NASA’s current status and create an implementation plan.
The BST report indicated there were multiple positive aspects in NASA’s culture e.g., spirit of teamwork, technical excellence, can-do approach.
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Assessing an organization’s culture for change readiness
The need for organizational change in NASA is dependent on improving organizational effectiveness through invention and innovation.
NASA’s cultural and climate alteration is influenced by research and improvement efforts.
Organizational cultural and climate improvement is based on psychological safety, having a clearly defined organizational structure, providing transparent organizational vetting and conducting service improvements.
Organizational change should be driven by a clear vision a strong case and the need for it to be valued.
A top-down approach stemming from strong leadership should include long-term commitment to ensure stickiness.
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NASA Overview and Organizational Culture
NASA’s culture is shaped by the long history of the ‘space race’, political influence, technical excellence.
This pressure drove NASA to be as efficient as possible in order to outperform other competitors e.g., the Soviets.
NASA’s culture allows some technical flaws because previous flights have been successfully completed “normalization of deviance”
Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) provides recommendations/ directions that NASA’s organizational culture should be altered but fail to provide specific directions for changing the culture.
NESC assesses recurring anomalies in the engineering decisions that indicated they had not effect on flight safety. This culture is aligned to NASA’s organizational culture on safety and integrity (NASA Cultures).
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Assessing NASA’s current culture
NASA is geared towards altering future flaws and minimizing risks that may lead to future accidents.
Improving technical and operational excellence will lead to massive organizational climate/cultural change
Cultural change involves the alteration of organizational behavior, mission statement, slogan, among other artifacts and aligning them to organizational objectives.
Behavioral change at NASA is geared towards elimination of barriers to culture and safety mindset, promoting alignment and integration of NASA’s workforce in support of strong safety climate.
The sense of urgency that NASA previously had in competition from other nations and political pressure may not be relevant because the space race is not as relevant.
Hence, organizational change should be geared towards ensuring precision and safety
Organizational change should be aligned to space development and scientific knowledge.
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Assessing NASA’s Current Culture
Assessing the current organizational structure is vital to help the evaluators understand the coherent and deficient segments of the organization.
Identifying deficiencies in the current organizational culture allows for the pinpointing of the issues and gives a starting point for altering the organizational culture.
Organizational culture should be geared to changing the negative aspects of the current culture.
Assessing NASA’s Current Culture
Assessing NASA’s current organizational culture helps understand workforce dominant and unstated shared beliefs and values.
Shared beliefs and values within the organization provide operational aspects of the workforce who operate according to their current values and beliefs.
Values and beliefs influence the workforce’s functioning and behaviors within the organization.
Adapting Performance Management
The CAIB provided gaps in leadership practices to support safety as
Failing to follow NASA’s own procedures
Requiring people to prove the existence of a problem instead of assuming the need to assure there was no problem
Creating a perception that schedule was a critical driver of the program.
Leadership is a vital component in the organizational cultural change because it provides the objectives to be met and initiatives to be followed.
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Adapting Performance Management
Leaders set the example and provision what is acceptable and unacceptable and valuable within the organization.
Leaders are able to influence other organizational stakeholders behaviors and actions with their own actions and words and the consequences they enforces.
Conveying sincere information during cultural change is vital to the success of the organizational change.
References
Boin A., Schulman P., (2008). Assessing NASA’s Safety Culture: The Limits and Possibilities of High-Reliability Theory. http://faculty.cbpp.uaa.alaska.edu/afgjp/padm610/Assessing%20NASA's%20Safety%20Culture.pdf
Glisson C., (2016). The Role of Organizational Culture and Climate in Innovation and Effectiveness. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5008450/
NASA Cultures. Critical Issues in the History of SpaceFlight. https://history.nasa.gov/SP-2006-4702/chapters/chapter11.pdf
