A critical approach towards an integrative dynamic framework for understanding and managing organizational culture change
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Week2Reading.pdf
Week 2: Defining Organizational Culture
Learning Objectives:
• Identify the limitations of the sociological and anthropological approaches
to organizational culture
• Understand the psychological approach to organizational culture
• Present the mechanisms in which psychological processes influence
culture formation (Social identity theory, Social representation theory)
• Identify an operational definition of organizational culture
1.1 The limitations of the sociological and anthropological approaches to
organizational culture
In the previous reading, the complexity of culture was evident in the way prominent
authors constructed theoretical models in order to understand certain aspects of culture. There
seems to be a consensus among those authors about the realization that organisational culture
requires interpretation and deciphering. For this reason, we identified three different contextual
approaches towards the concept of organizational culture, i.e. the sociological approach, the
anthropological approach and the psychological approach. The purpose was to identify
different aspects of organizational culture following valid theoretical frameworks in an attempt
to reduce the dimensions of the concept to a manageable level. Those aspects were identified
gradually based on the different dimensions each approach highlighted.
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Table 2.1 presents such aspects for the sociological and the anthropological approaches.
Approach Dimensions of the concept of Associated aspect
organizational culture
- Decision-making structures Sociological within the organization
- Performance and continuing - Social interaction (employee
professional development as a social being within the
- External influences and internal organization)
social networking - Performance, leadership,
- Collective mind collective action
- Cohesive actions
- Leadership style
- Interpersonal relationships
Anthropological - Shared system of values, beliefs, - Power distance
behaviours, customs and ideas (organisation-driven vs
- The ‘trading-off’ process in expertise-driven), i.e. the
defining common values extent to which power
- Predominant culture influences the ‘trading-off’
- Individual preferences; yet, process
collective purpose - The complex nature of
interpersonal relationships
Table 2.1 The different aspects of organizational culture – Part I - The sociological and anthropological approaches -
The sociological and anthropological approaches to organizational culture indicated that,
although culture is multi-layered in its manifestations, it is also characterised by a simple
system of shared values and collective beliefs and understandings. Therefore, the question that
arises is whether or not employees’ participation in social groups and the way in which they
interact with other individuals within the organization are important means of understanding
how they see themselves, as well.
However, it seems obvious that the sociological and anthropological approaches appear
to be inadequate to answer the above question. For this reason, we will now turn focus on the
psychological approach to organizational culture.
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1.2 The psychological approach to organizational culture
However, at the same time, the two approaches appeared to be inadequate to explain.
These are issues on which psychological theory may help us understand.
The necessity to examine organizational culture in the psychological context arose from
the realization that both the sociological and anthropological models of organizational culture
involved aspects of subjective human perceptions and behaviour, which cannot be explained
by the mechanics presented in those models. For example, how exactly shared values and
collective beliefs develop within an organization or, indeed, how those get transmitted or
negotiated between individuals, i.e. how the ‘trading-off’ process mentioned in the previous
reading operates?
Schneider’s model implied that different emotions guide the employees’ behavior and
the development of interpersonal relationships within an organization. Therefore, if we aimed
to try and understand those emotions and the associated psychological processes involved,
would, perhaps, allow us to answer the above questions and understand how different types of
organizational culture emerge.
Quinn & Rohrbaugh (1983) were the first authors who tried to understand culture
formation through the psychological framework of competing values (‘The competing values
framework’). In this section, we make use of the psychological model of organizational
culture, which was developed based on the “the competing values framework”, as the main
means of understanding the contribution of the psychological approach to defining the concept
of organizational culture. If we accept the basic premise of Schneider’s model (Schneider,
1994), i.e. the ‘trading-off’ process, we will be in a position to understand how the
predominant culture profile is gradually emerging within an organization. Stated differently,
“the competing values framework” might help us understand the mechanics of ‘trading-off’
values in the process of culture formation.
“The competing values framework” presents organizations in a continuum of four core
values, as follows: flexibility, stability, differentiation and integration. These values represent
opposite or competing assumptions. Therefore, each continuum represents a core value,
which is opposite of the core value at the other end of the continuum.
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The framework is schematically presented in Figure 2.1.
Flexibility
Internal focus External focus
Control
Figure 2.1 The Competing Values Framework
(Reproduced by Quinn and Rohrbaugh, 1983)
Cameron & Quinn (2011) utilized the “Competing values framework” in order to
devise an organizational culture model, which would allow a deeper understanding of the
mechanics involved in ‘trading-off’ values during the culture formation.
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The model is presented in Figure 2.2 below.
Flexibility and Discretion
Clan culture Adhocracy
(collaborate)
culture (create)
Internal External Focus and Focus and
Integration Differentiation
Hierarchy Market culture
culture (control) (compete)
Stability and Control
Figure 2.2 Cameron & Quinn’s Psychological Model of Organizational Culture
(Reproduced by Cameron & Quinn, 2011)
The hierarchy culture emerges as the result of a stable environment, which permits tasks
and functions to integrate and coordinate, products continue to be produced uniformly and jobs
are under control. The emphasis here is on productivity and efficiency and, for this reason,
consistent and systematic problem-solving attitude is paramount. This type of culture exists in
formalized and highly-structured working environments, such as large corporations and
government agencies.
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Taking the above description one step further, we are able to observe that the hierarchy
culture may involve the emotion of self-deprecation or self-doubt of the employees of an
organization with this particular culture. This is due to the fact that the core value of this
highly-structured environment is control, which prevents employees from pursuing state-of-
the-art activities of professional development or, indeed, exploring advanced skills and new
areas of their expertise. As a result, the psychological process involved could be reluctance
and resistance to the existing culture. Indeed, Cameron & Quinn (2011) stated that under the
influence of the hierarchy culture, the decision-making processes and the management and
leadership styles are characterised by control and accountability only and there is no actual
concern about innovation or human development.
On the contrary, the clan culture is formed by the value of collaboration. The focus is
still on internal consistency and integration of working roles, but success is defined in terms of
the organization’s concern for people and their professional development. Both the
management and leadership styles are characterised by a flexible, friendly, team-oriented
approach capable of inspiring loyalty and dedication to the overall effort. Furthermore, the
employees participate in the decision-making processes of the organization and they have the
flexibility and discretion to pursue specific goals of their professional development with the
support of their managers, who act as mentors. Examples of this type of culture includes
family businesses and charity organizations.
The clan culture invests in empowering the employees of an organization and, therefore,
the possible emotions involved in the process of accepting or rejecting this type of culture are
satisfaction, self-confidence and fulfilment. To this end, the associated psychological process
could be compliance/concurrence with the predominant culture profile of the organization.
At the other end of the continuum, we have the market culture and the adhocracy
culture, which involve external focus, i.e. focus on influential factors outside the organization,
and differentiation, i.e. excellence based on competition rather than collaboration and
cooperation.
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The market culture understands the highly-competitive environment and it applies a
results-oriented management and leadership styles driven by the key value of competition. The
emphasis is on how to utilise stable environment and controlling procedures in order to
increase productivity, results and profits and differentiate the organization from its key
competitors. The market culture evokes the emotion of assertiveness, self-confidence, pride
and decisiveness. This type of culture is quite intense and, as result, emotions may reach
dangerously high levels in such an extremely competitive environment. Nonetheless, the
possible psychological process involved is motivation because market culture encourages the
management team to generously reward additional effort and unexpectedly positive outcomes.
In other words, although competition may be easily exaggerated, it could also become the main
reason for the motivation of employees to be kept strong and consistent.
However, the adhocracy culture involves a set of values and beliefs formed to serve a
temporary objective and they are subjected to change. For this reason, they may also be
flexible, adaptable and dynamic. Under this type of culture, the employees of an organization
are flexible to pursue their professional development goals and they have established support
in order to do so. Furthermore, the management and leadership styles are visionary, innovative
and risk-oriented. The idea is to focus internally on how to integrate working roles and
services by allowing adequate flexibility to the employees in order to develop themselves
professionally. In the medium term and longer term, this would allow experimentation,
creativity and innovation to thrive, and the organization to differentiate itself from its key
competitors by applying cutting-edge knowledge to produce unique and original products and
services (Yu & Wu, 2009). Therefore, the most influential value here is creativity.
In this context, the adhocracy culture inspires a sense of commitment to the organization
because, although the organization pays attention to results and outcomes, it also allows the
employees to develop themselves professionally. Therefore, we could deduce the possible
emotional feelings associated with this type of culture, such as feeling content, gratified,
fulfilled, inspired, ambitious and capable to perform. Although there is risk involved, the sense
of commitment is strong due to the flexible environment and the discretion allowed to the
employees. As a result, this sense of commitment is also the psychological process involved in
such a dynamic type of culture, which is gradually developing by the employees of the
organization.
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Table 2.2 presents the psychological approach to organisational culture provided by
Cameron & Quinn (2011) with the key value, the type of working environment, the possible
emotions/feelings and the psychological process involved in each of the four types of
organizational culture included in the model.
Type of Possible Possible
Culture working Key value emotions/ psychological
environment feelings process
involved involved
Hierarchy Highly- Control Self- Reluctance/
structured deprecation, resistance
self-doubt
Clan Flexible, Collaboration Satisfaction,
friendly self-confidence, Compliance/con
fulfilment currence
Market Highly- Competition Assertiveness,
competitive self-confidence, Motivation
pride,
decisiveness
Adhocracy Flexible, Fulfilment,
adaptable, Creativity ambition, Commitment
dynamic inspiration,
gratification
Table 2.2 The main elements of Cameron & Quinn’s Psychological model of Organisational Culture
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1.3 Further discussion on the psychological approach to organizational culture
Cameron & Quinn’s psychological model of organizational culture revealed different
psychological processes involved in culture formation, such as reluctance, compliance,
motivation and commitment. Furthermore, the model showed that employees’ participation in
specific social groups does provide information about the way in which employees reflect
upon themselves. In other words, employees are driven by their emotional needs to classify
people into different categories or groups as a way of ‘understanding’ how they could interact
with them. For example, employees may approach a colleague with significant technical
expertise with respect, but never consider him/her as “one of us”. Similarly, they may feel the
need to assign a superior-subordinate dimension to the interaction with their line manager,
despite the fact that they are working together in a friendly manner every single day because
they perceive this interaction as potentially threatening to their future working life.
However, Cameron & Quinn’s model highlighted the need of every individual to seek
positive sources of self-esteem. Indeed, most employees would perceive their participation in a
social group as a means of deriving some pride or self-esteem. In other words, they perceive
their ‘sense of belonging’ to a particular social group as an important representation of the
values that characterised them as individuals. According to Tajfel & Turner (1979), this is the
main premise of social identity theory.
At this point, we should note that there is adequate evidence that supports the association
between the employees’ participation in a social group and social, as well as personal, self-
esteem (Hayes & Lemon, 1991). Social self-esteem is simply the esteem at group level, which
holds the shared collective self-image of the members of that group. On the other hand,
personal self-esteem is the esteem enjoyed by the individual, which normally arises from the
individual’s perceptions about their worth; not necessarily as an employee but as an individual,
more generally.
The fact that evidence exists to support both associations indicates how strong of an
influence the employees’ participation in a social group could be. Stated differently, the way in
which an average employee perceives his/her own individual values and beliefs depends on the
way in which his/her participation in a particular social group within an organisation influences the
development of those individual values. Therefore, we could finally infer that both the
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employees’ personal self-esteem and social self-esteem are shaped by the intergroup
discrimination, i.e. the extent to which common values of members of the same group
differentiate them from members of other groups. This is indeed a very powerful
psychological process, which plays an important role in the ‘trading-off’ process of values.
Moscovici (1984) explained that this psychological process is exactly the driver towards
a specific type of organizational culture. He named this process social representation theory.
The main premise of this theory is the notion that members of the same group assign
ideological value to their participation in that group and, for this reason, they perceive their
social identity as members of the group as reflection of their own individual identity. In this
way, the mechanism that shapes common identity involves the symbolic value of the common
interpretation of shared values and beliefs, shared views of the world, shared perspectives
about organizational growth or change or, indeed, shared decision-making for action or
inaction.
A question still remains unanswered: “how exactly the predominant culture emerges?”.
We stated previously that there is a ‘trading-off’ process of values, which determines the
dominant culture profile within an organization. It is important to add that this process occurs
not only between members of the same group but also between different groups. The
difference is that members of the same group are trying to find common ground and define the
culture type that represents the whole group (in-group ‘trading-off’), whereas discussions
between members of different groups aim to make clear the differences between the values that
represent them (intergroup ‘trading-off’). Nonetheless, the representative culture for the whole
organization will emerge as the dominant culture of a particular group, following an intergroup
‘trading-off’ process of values. This process normally involves intense organised or random
discussions and negotiations through which individuals try to justify or rationalise their own
preferences for certain values and groups try to identify ways in which certain individuals
could adjust and adapt in order to accept the dominant system of values, i.e. the dominant
culture. This is indeed the ideological function of the social representation theory (Moscovici,
1984), which allows employees to not simply adopt certain values, but to discuss and adapt
those values until they can be fully integrated into their own cognitive framework. Surely, a
central nucleus of the dominant system of values does not change, but peripheral elements may
be adapted and be adjusted in order to satisfy all members of all groups (Jodelet, 1991).
Ultimately, the predominant culture must represent everyone, in one way or another. However,
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this does not mean that the differences between the sets of values among different groups
would suddenly be disappeared.
Table 2.3 summarises the key aspects derived from the psychological approach and
its associated dimensions.
Approach Dimensions of the concept of Associated aspect
organizational culture
- Assigning meanings to individual - Emotion-driven
values and beliefs interpretation of values
Psychological - Subjectivity (perceptions and - Psychological processes
behaviour) influencing the ‘trading-off’
- A personal sense of ‘belonging’ process in defining common
values and the predominant
culture
Table 2.3 The different aspects of organizational culture – Part II
- The psychological approach -
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1.4 An operational definition of organizational culture
Based on the information presented in Tables 2.1-2.3 and following Hofstede’s seven
characteristics described in the previous reading, we are now able to derive an operational
definition of organizational culture, as follows:
Culture is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes the members of one
group or category of people from others based on shared values, beliefs and assumptions
about how to behave, interact, perform, lead and make decisions.
This definition of organizational culture will be used throughout this module. However,
it is important to note that, since there is no widely-acceptable definition of culture, we
should always remain focused on the seven characteristics of organizational culture, as
described by Hofstede in the previous reading (Hofstede et al., 1990). Indeed, the elusive
nature of culture leads to the conclusion that the value of any definition will not be as
important as the knowledge of a set of broadly-accepted fundamental characteristics of
culture.
In order to fully understand the practical meaning of the definition, we redirect focus to
some variables, which, evidently, are associated with organizational culture. Although there
are many such variables in the literature, we will examine the relationship between
organizational culture and the psychological variables which were most frequently associated
with organizational culture in the literature (Alvesson, 2002). Thus, in the next reading, we
will examine the possible relationship between organizational culture and performance,
leadership and management. This exploration is also consistent with the dimensions of
culture identified in Tables 2.1 and 2.3 (second column), which, in turn, led to the derivation
of the operational definition of organizational culture.
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1.5 Concluding remarks
The limitations of the sociological and anthropological approaches to organizational
culture led to the conclusion that a psychological approach was necessary in order to better
understand the concept and aim to derive an operational definition of organizational culture.
Indeed, the most representative model of the psychological approach, offered by
Cameron & Quinn (2011), utilised the “competing values framework” and presented four
different types of organizational culture. The model combined elements from the sociological
and anthropological approaches, while paying attention to significant psychological
processes, such as reluctance, compliance, motivation and commitment.
Cameron & Quinn’s model was subsequently utilised in order to derive further insights
into the ‘trading-off process’ of values, described in the previous reading. According to this
model, the employee of an organization would perceive their participation in a particular social
group as an important representation of the values that characterise them as individuals. This
was essentially the main premise of social identity theory, which also revealed the strong
relationship between the employees’ participation in social groups and their personal and
social perception of self-esteem.
The second insight arose from Moscovici’s social representation theory, which was also
associated with Cameron & Quinn’s model of organizational culture. According to this theory,
both the ‘trading-off’ process between members of the same group and between members of
different groups, and hence, the emergence of the predominant culture, are based on the
premise that the set of shared values and beliefs are not fixed and there is a degree of flexibility
in terms of adapting and adjusting those in order to, ultimately represent, in one way or
another, all individuals of the organization. This is a difficult process, which involves
discussions and negotiations through which individuals try to justify their preferences and
groups try to defend their representative values.
The gradual methodological way followed in the current and previous readings allowed
us to derive an operational definition of organizational culture, based on the three contextual
approaches, which will be used throughout the module in order to discuss more complex
topics.
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Reading tips
- In this reading, we referred many times to the importance of choosing the most representative
models of organizational culture. This is easier said than done. In order to produce the reading
of this week, we needed to go through a careful selection of models and choose the one which
appears to be most-frequently cited by prominent authors in the field. Therefore, when
studying, make sure that you consult additional sources, so that you are familiar with the
existence of alternative models of organizational culture. This will help you dramatically during
the preparation of your assignments.
- Please make sure that you dedicate time to observe the ‘continuity’ of the readings. For
example, this weeks’ reading depends on the previous week’s reading and the derivation of
the definition of organizational culture emerged as the gradual result of material included in
both readings. For this reason, it is imperative that you start reading the material from
beginning to end, without aiming to choose certain readings only, because this would
seriously compromise your ability to understand the material.
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1.6 References
Alvesson, M. (2003). Understanding organizational culture, 2nd ed. London, United Kingdom: Sage.
Cameron, K. S., & Quinn, R. E. (2011). An Introduction to changing organizational culture: Based on the competing values framework. Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture, 1–12.
Hayes, N. J. & Lemon, N. (1990) Stimulating Positive Cultures in Growing Companies.
Leadership & Organisational Change Management, 11(7) 17-21.
Hofstede, G., Neuijen, B., Ohayv, D. D., & Sanders, G. (1990). Measuring Organizational
Cultures: A qualitative and quantitative study across twenty cases. Administrative Science
Quarterly, 35(2), 286–316. https://doi.org/10.2307/2393392.
Jodelet, D. (1991) Madness and Social Representations (trans. T. Pownall), Hemel Hempstead:
Harvester Wheatsheaf.
Moscovici, S. (1984) The phenomenon of social representations In: R.M. Farr & S. Moscovici
(eds) Social Representations Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Quinn, R. E., & Rohrbaugh, J. (1983). A Spatial Model of Effectiveness Criteria: Towards a Competing Values Approach to Organizational Analysis. Management Science, 29(3), 363– 377. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.29.3.363
Schneider, W. (1994) The Reengineering Alternative: A Plan for Making Your Current Culture
Work. Burr Ridge, IL: Irwin Professional Publishing.
Tajfel, H. & Turner, J. C. (1979) An Integrative Theory of Intergroup Conflict In: W.G. Austin
& S. Worchel (eds) The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Monterey, Cal:
Brooks/Cole
Yu, T. & Wu, (2009). A review of study on the competing values framework. International
Journal of Business and Management, 4(7), 37-42.
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