Article Review

ORG 6600, Culture of Learning Organizations 1

Course Learning Outcomes for Unit III Upon completion of this unit, students should be able to:

4. Analyze the impact of a founder’s values and behaviors on the culture of an organization.

Reading Assignment Chapter 13: How Founders/Leaders Create Organizational Cultures In order to access the resource below, you must first log into the myWaldorf Student Portal and access the Business Source Complete database within the Waldorf Online Library. Ogbonna, E., & Harris, L. C. (2001). The founder’s legacy: Hangover or inheritance? British Journal of

Management, 12(1), 13-31.

Unit Lesson Welcome Welcome to Unit III. In this unit, we will discuss how culture develops within an organization and how the founder’s values and behaviors shape the organizational culture. Experience with Newly Forming Groups Think of your past experiences when you were part of a group that was newly forming. Maybe it was a sports team, a choir or theatre group, a military squad or detail, a volunteer organization, or a new team at work. What was going through your mind as you gathered as part of this new group? Were you excited, somewhat anxious, or a mixture of both? In either case, without even realizing it, you were likely on high alert as you scanned the environment and observed the interactions of people within this new group. This is the process of learning the social rules—the norms for what people should say and do—as part of this group. Through this process, the new group established its system of deep, underlying assumptions. Chances are—if this group consisted of Americans—some of the norms of this group were borrowed from the American macroculture. Nevertheless, each group develops its own set of norms. Think of the analogy of a snowflake. Most snowflakes tend to be white and cold to the touch. Characteristics like these, which snowflakes tend to have in common, represent the broad American culture. Each individual snowflake has things in common with other snowflakes (i.e., the American macroculture), but the individual snowflake is also intricately designed and unique, just like the culture of a small group (i.e., a microculture). While a microculture shares commonalities with the macroculture, it has intricacies that are specific to that small group, making it unique. Therefore, just because we are familiar with the general norms of the American macroculture, this does not mean that those norms will be mirrored in the new group. “We bring culture with us from our past experience, but we are constantly reinforcing that culture or building new elements as we encounter new people and new experiences” (Schein, 2010, p. 197). When you encounter a new group, you seek to decipher the group’s emerging norms through observation. As people interact with each other in the new group, they are testing how others will react in order to identify the behaviors that will serve as norms within the group. Questions will run through people’s minds, such as those listed below. As they observe the new group develop its emerging culture, they will seek clues to answer these questions for themselves as they try to decipher the group’s norms:

UNIT III STUDY GUIDE

Creating Culture in Organizations

ORG 6600, Culture of Learning Organizations 2

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1. Will I be valued by the group? Will I be respected? 2. Will people respond to my ideas? Will people allow me to have the type of role that I would like to

have in this group? (Will the group consider me to be a leader? Will the group view me as a follower? What is my preference?)

3. Will this group be a fit for me? 4. Who will emerge as leaders? What kind of leadership styles do they have? What about the rest of the

group? 5. What happens if people disagree? How will they react? 6. Will this group be effective in meeting its goals? What are this group’s goals?

A sense of mission—what the group is ultimately all about—develops only as members begin genuinely to understand each other’s needs, goals, talents, and values, and as they begin to integrate these into a shared mission and define their own authority and [norms for interaction] (Schein, 2010, p. 201). Cultural Influence of the Organization Founder Some groups form without any predetermined leader. Other groups—organizations in particular—are formed as a result of a founder, who spearheads their development. In that case, the founder has a tremendous impact on the development of the organization’s culture (Fauchart & Gruber, 2011; Obgonna & Harris, 2001; Schein, 2010). Have you ever had an experience where you were part of a group or organization that was led by its founder? In that experience, was the founder a strict authoritarian, who exerted control and insisted on centralized decision-making? Or, did the founder’s leadership style reflect a coaching role, both nurturing and challenging employees and entrusting them to share in the decision-making process? When an organization is founded, the founder’s values and behaviors greatly influence the norms that the organization establishes. The founder’s behaviors often shape the behavioral norms that emerge throughout the new organization. Similarly, the founder’s values often become the organization’s values, and the deep underlying assumptions that are intertwined with those values are also adopted from the founder (Fauchart & Gruber, 2011; Obgonna & Harris, 2001; Schein, 2010). In the last unit, we discussed how people’s underlying assumptions are shaped by cultural definitions of, “evil versus good, dirty versus clean, dangerous versus safe, forbidden versus permitted, decent versus indecent, moral versus immoral, ugly versus beautiful, unnatural versus natural, abnormal versus normal, paradoxical versus logical, irrational versus rational” (Hofstede & Hofstede, 2005, p. 8). The organization founder’s deep, underlying assumptions strongly influence these aspects of the organization’s culture. In fact, the founder’s deep assumptions will determine who makes decisions within the organization, how employees are treated, whose contributions are valued, how time is spent on specific activities within the organization, how the organization spends its money, and the organization’s strategies for the future. The founder’s deep assumptions are highly influential in developing the organizational culture. This cultural influence often lasts long past the founder’s involvement within the organization and, oftentimes, beyond the founder’s lifetime. In this way, the organizational culture is part of the founder’s legacy (Fauchart & Gruber, 2011; Obgonna & Harris, 2001; Schein, 2010).

References

Fauchart, E., & Gruber, M. (2011). Darwinians, communitarians, and missionaries: The role of founder identity in entrepreneurship. Academy of Management Journal, 54(5), 935-957.

Obgonna, E., & Harris, L. C. (2001). The founder’s legacy: Hangover or inheritance? British Journal of

Management, 12(1), 13-31. Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational culture and leadership (4th ed.). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

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Suggested Reading Schein, E. H. (2010). How culture emerges in new groups. In Organizational culture and leadership (4th ed.)

(pp. 197-218). San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass. In order to access the resource below, you must first log into the myWaldorf Student Portal and access the Business Source Complete database within the Waldorf Online Library. Fauchart, E., & Gruber, M. (2011). Darwinians, communitarians, and missionaries: The role of founder identity

in entrepreneurship. Academy of Management Journal, 54(5), 935-957.