MANAGING WITHIN A CULTURE BASIC INFORMATION AND TUTORIALS

No research is required to demonstrate that people are an organization’s greatest asset and that organizational culture determines performance. Success in any organization comes from assembling a critical mass of people in the required disciplines and creating a culture that supports the group of unique individuals with all their foibles and idiosyncrasies.

So what is organizational culture? In my previous book,3 I described organizational culture as: ‘‘including the shared values, the beliefs, the legends, the rituals, the past history, the intellectual and operational traditions, the pride in past accomplishments, the policies and practices, the rules of conduct, the organization’s general philosophy of operation, and other artifacts that define the organization.’’

There are two parts to this description: the behavioral and the emotional. The behavioral aspects of an organizational culture include shared values, beliefs, intellectual traditions, policies and practices, rules of conduct, and philosophy of operation.

The emotional aspects include the legends, rituals, past history, and pride in past accomplishments. While the behavioral elements may be granted greater significance because they are measurable, the emotional elements add the ingredients that generate the spirit and passion of the organization.

Organizational cultures span a continuum from the overcontrolled to the overpermissive. Overcontrolled cultures limit creativity and innovation, and overpermissive cultures seldom provide a sustaining organization.

As practitioners in managing we know that most people need some level of control and relatively few can function effectively with total freedom. The manager’s job is to balance control and freedom to the group and also to the individuals within the group.

Most discussions about culture focus on the macro-organization’s culture, but the most important culture is the culture that you as a manager develop for your specific group. The organization will most likely promote a stated culture but the culture you develop for your group will depend on your needs, the activities and expectations assigned to your group, and the competencies and attitudes of the people.

While senior management may promote creativity and innovation we would question just how much and how often we’d want creativity and innovation in the finance department. We’d question just how many productive mavericks should be in the payroll department.

We have seen in recent years the disasters created by creative accounting. However, if you’re managing a research, development, or marketing function, creativity and innovation may be the number one priority.

This does not suggest that any organizational function can eliminate creativity and innovation from its vocabulary, but each function will need creativity and innovation of a different type, on a different scale, and guided by different principles. So although the organization may have principles that define its culture, you will develop a culture based on your people and your vision and direction as a manager.