The meaning and importance of culture for project success
Introduction
A strong culture shapes an organization's decision patterns, guides actions, and drives
individual behavior of all members. In its most obvious form, it is “The way we do things around
here to succeed.” In its less visible form, it encompasses the shared beliefs, norms, symbols,
values, attitudes that permeate all parts of the organization. These enduring patterns help provide
stability – an important benefit – for the organization. But, a strong culture can also erect barriers
to getting the results needed to remain competitive. Culture is potent. It can block an
organization's (or project) strategy or catalyze it.
Project leaders who lack cultural awareness can become restricted and handicapped by the
values and beliefs of the base organization's culture. They can have difficulty understanding and
adapting to different norms and behaviors across the organization. By contrast, enlightened
project leaders have a strong connection to their cultures. They are more sensitive and capable of
interacting with other kinds of cultures and are more adaptable, flexible and effective. This paper
discusses what organizational culture is and is not and how it influences behavior. Our purpose is
to help project leaders gain a better understanding of organizational culture, its underlying
process, how it develops, identify the characteristics of the core culture types, how to develop
ways for recognizing, changing and adapting to their own behavior while working with
dissimilar cultures. This knowledge can help project leaders become more effective and get the
planned project results. It also discusses ways to describe culture, the attributes of the “Core”
culture, and the critical link between strategy, culture and leadership behaviors. This paper is
grounded in theory and is both descriptive and prescriptive and offers some suggestions that can
help project leaders understand their culture and that of others and is an aid to making projects
more successful.
What is Organizational Culture?
Basically, an organization's culture is its personality. It's comprised of assumptions, beliefs,
values, norms, and tangible signs (artifacts) or organization members and their behaviors.
Culture is a very powerful force and is multidimensional. The same person placed in different
organizations (or parts of the same organization) would act differently, because a strong
embedded culture creates social ideals that guide individual behavior. These ideals are
manifested in a number of ways. A strong culture can generate commitment to the organization's
values. In high performing organizations (Collins & Porras 1998) strong cultures endure and are
a means by which organizations can strengthen their performance, adapt to change and changing
environments while increasing their chances of survival and maintaining their competitive
performance. Culture is a means by which messages about what the organization stands for is
conveyed to employees and other stakeholders. When individuals become committed to the
organization's beliefs, those beliefs become internalized and individual members hold them as
their personal beliefs. Whether we as individuals are aware or not, the internalization process
occurs and, if congruent, can be a means of personal satisfaction. In other words, our
organization's personality becomes our personality and vice-versa.
Understanding the culture of your organization is critical to running successful projects.
Culture resides in every fold of an enterprise, influencing the dynamics of how people perform,
relate and perceive the organization's impact on their lives. The organizational psychologist
Edward Schein defined organizational culture as “a pattern of shared basic assumptions that the
group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has
worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore to be taught to new members as the
correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.” (Schein,1992, p34)
Schein's definition is insightful. Shared assumptions are the heart of any culture. It
references problem solving and adaptation, which differentiate organizational culture from other
types of cultures not bounded to business. Finally, it highlights the generational nature of culture,
recognizing that succeeding groups of organization members learn about culture from the current
generation.
What Internal Forces Shape Culture? The Link between Strategy, Culture, Leadership and
Performance
Powerful external and internal forces shape an organization's culture that impact projects.
The vision, mission, strategy whether well conceived and communicated or not are played
out by the organization. For example, in some organizations like Southwest Airlines every
employee can tell you precisely the organization's strategy. And, it has a profound impact on the
success of that organization's culture and performance. Some organizations have as their strategy
to dominate the marketplace and have the only product, technology or service and strive toward
maintaining stability. Others strive to have the most superior products or services and are
extremely adaptive.
Structure affects culture. For example, rigid, formal and command and control structures
can promote functional efficiency at the expense of collaborative innovation (projects). Within
the structure of the organization subcultures typically exit. Subcultures grow out of different
locations and occupations and the provision of services. Even within the same organization,
subcultures may be starkly different from the base organization's culture. For example, the
marketing department may embrace values even more fervently than the base culture, whereas
the research department may challenge dominate “command and control” values of the corporate
culture.
Leadership actions communicate beliefs, values and assumptions and what is most
important. A leader's actions far outweigh newsletters, memos or policy manuals. Spending time
walking the corridors and speaking and listening to employees and customers communicates a
powerful message. Some leaders emphasize incentives and rewards. They foster individual and
group competition. Other leaders encourage working in a collaborative manner and synergist
relationships.
Human resources practices such as who gets hired and promoted, who gets terminated or
demoted, who gets counseled and coached, who goes to training. Are people handled humanly or
treated as an expense line item on the budget? How are people rewarded and how their
performance is evaluated all send powerful messages and shape culture? Who gets rewarded?
Performance measures play an enormous role in determining an organization's culture.
What gets measured – profits, costs savings, behaviors. Is individual or team contributions
emphasized. Is short term or long term thinking and decisions emphasized.
External forces also shape culture_and are very powerful_since organizations reflect
transnational, national, regional, industry and occupational ideologies. These may take the form
of religion, science, political ideologies, and environmental concerns (nuclear energy, wildlife,
world hunger). The substance of an organization's culture may reflect many beliefs, only some of
which originate within the organization. All of these elements listed above affect how people
perceive the organization and how the behave.
Do You Know Your Organization's Culture?
Understanding and assessing your organization's culture can mean the difference between
success and failure in today's fast changing business environment. Leaders typically have a view
of their culture based on wishes than on a grounded, rational view. Understanding and then
confronting the reality of an organization's culture may not always be pleasant, but it is
necessary. Very often what management pays attention to and rewards are often the strongest
indicators of the organization's culture. This is often quite different then the values it verbalizes
or the ideals it strives for. Think for a minute about the culture you work in and imagine you
were asked to describe your organization to an outsider. How would you answer the following
questions: What ten words would you use to describe your company? Around here what's really
important? Around here who gets promoted? Around here what behaviors get rewarded? Around
here who fits in and who does not fit in? Does management encourage or discourage innovation?
Do mavericks fit in or do they get pushed out? Does management reward employees for coming
up with new ideas and challenging old ways of doing things? Does the organization truly value
excellence or is the mentality “just ship it”? Does management pay attention to the wellbeing of
employees or is it completely focused on task and profits?
This kind of inquiry can give insight into the real culture of your organization and some of
its underlying values and beliefs. It may not be what you think. Your organization's culture is not
the espoused values developed at an offsite meeting and posted on your website. These are
ideals. What you strive to be and what you hope to endorse, may be completely different from
the values, beliefs and norms expressed in your actual practice and behavior. It is critical that you
awaken and find out who you really are as well as striving for who you want to be. A good
evaluation or assessment of where you are now can provide sound measurable data about the real
organization's values and beliefs. Individuals, groups, departments, projects, and organizations
seldom fit one particular classification or pure type because they represent complex social
systems and mixtures of many cultural patterns. Nevertheless, there are models that identify
some systematic process that project and senior leaders can use to make sense of their
environment. The one most compelling, elegant and robust used extensively by some very high
profile firms is the model created by William Schneider. The rest of this paper will briefly
describe Schneider's model, an archetypal model that can be helpful for project as well as senior
leaders in understanding the different dimensions of culture.
The Four Core Cultures
The foundation of each of the four cultures rests on what each culture focuses on and how
each makes decisions. Each culture is uniquely defined by the kind of input that is important to it
and by the process it relies on to form judgments and make decisions. When viewed together, the
four cultures reveal a number of underlying patterns (See Exhibit 1).
Exhibit 1
The underlying pattern is illustrated by two axes that when combined with one another
along two separate axes yield four component parts pf the table and represent the four core
cultures. The vertical axis considers what an organization pays attention to, or the content. The
horizontal axis considers how an organization makes decisions, forms judgments or the process.
The content axis is bounded by actuality and possibility; the process axis is bounded by
impersonal and personal.
It is important to note that Schneider states “that the qualities and characteristics associate
with the content and process axes are organizational and cultural preferences or central
tendencies” and as such “are not exclusionary – having a preference for one does not preclude
involvement in the other.” (Schneider, 1994, p51) It does not mean that facts are all that an
actuality organization deals with or that a possibility organization never attends to facts. One
simply predominates or is central to how the firm works. A brief description of each core culture
is provided below.
CONTROL Core Culture
This culture is all about certainty and has its roots in a more militaristic model. It
fundamentally exists to ensure certainty, predictability, safety, accuracy and dependability.
Implications for the Project Leader
Projects often have a profound impact on the organization and the people within it. Projects
transform all or parts of an organization and by their very nature create change to the base
organization or individual departments. Projects usually involve the design and development of a
new physical product or service that may contain complex technical elements. The problem most
common of projects is to concentrate and emphasize the technical content at the expense of
understanding its impact on the people (users) and the organization. An important characteristic
of project work is the extent to which people who will use the product are invited to participate
in the work. Very often the work is done by specialist without the cooperation, participation and
commitment of the end users.
Project leaders must be able to interact with various sub-cultural elements within their
organization and that of the customer and often simultaneously. Leaders who are aware of
cultural differences can avoid or minimize unproductive conflicts and misunderstandings.
Differences may arise for various reasons including, values, assumptions, and beliefs and arise
from problems communicating across cultures. The nature of communication in research and
development is very different from the language spoken in marketing. It is important for the
leader to make a concerted effort to speak and listen in ways that take these differences into
account. An obstinate, hasty judgment that attributes project barriers to another person's
inflexibility or stubbornness may polarize differences, escalate conflict and make it very difficult
or next to impossible to complete the project.
Projects have a higher probability of succeeding when they:
• Start with the premise that organizations are living social systems.
• Assess, identify, work with and align with the organization's core culture.
• Design on the front end a system focused perspective and are implemented in a
manner congruent with that design.
• Tie directly to the organization's strategy
• Align with culture and leadership initiatives
• Understand that all organizations have a lead core culture and subcultures and the
key is that the project culture must function in service of the organization's core or lead
culture.
Summary
The purpose of this article was to demonstrate that project teams and organizations have
unique personalities, value systems and a way they do things to succeed. The more a project
leader understands the concept of culture, the more effective he will be in gaining support and
guiding the project through the myriad of organization mazes. Project leaders often engage in
transactions with several different cultures simultaneously. Project leaders typically work within
their own base organization core culture, with the subcultures of other departments (research and
development, marketing and sales or manufacturing – each with their own inherent “ways of
doing things around here to succeed”) or working with external customers and their core culture.
Understanding and speaking the language of the immediate culture is critical for project success.
Effectively communicating with the surrounding culture can help develop plans, strategies that
are more likely recognized and time-honored, by bypassing practices that violate the beliefs and
values of the client organization.
Project leaders have many opportunities to create and shape a project culture in purposeful
ways, but that culture must be in alignment with the organization's lead culture. This is an
important part of project team development and a healthy team climate and stage setting to
ensure project success.
References
Collins, J.C. & Porras, J.L., (1994) Built To Last: Successful Habits of Visionary
Companies. New York: HaperCollins Publishers, Inc.
Haimes, G. (2001) Project Culture: A Paradigm Shift in Project Management: Proceedings
of the Project Management Institute Annual Seminars & Symposium. Nashville, TN, USA
Knutson, J. (2001). Project Management for Business Professionals. New York: John
Wiley & Sons.
Pitagorsky, G. (2001) Implementing PM Improvement-A Cultural and Organizational
Change Initiative. Proceedings of the Project Management Institute Annual Seminars &
Symposium. Nashville, TN, USA
Schein, E.H, (1992). Organizational Culture and Leadership, 2nd ed. San Francisco:
Jossey-Bass
