“Watch Your Back”: What is Organizational Culture and Why Should We Care?
In 2011, I volunteered to join 42 other women engaging in deliberate combat operations with male soldiers, for the first time in US Army history. All forty-three women were all active and dedicated Army members, trying our best to live the Army’s ‘core values’ of Loyalty, Duty, Selfless Service, Respect, Honor, Integrity and Personal Courage. In combat training, we had no doubt that the ‘brothers’ with whom we would be going out into combat zones with also believed in the same core values—we were reassured that we could trust them with our lives. Imagine, then, our surprise to receive many warning admonitions from senior officers that, as women, we needed to ‘watch our backs’ as we would be at an extremely heightened risk for sexual harassment and assault from those same ‘brothers’. Not surprising to anyone in 2020, the US Army has an extreme problem with what has come to be called ‘rape-culture’, and it is deeply embedded in the organization’s culture. So, what do we do about it?
According to Robbins and Judge (2016), Organizational Culture can be described as “a system of shared meaning held by members that distinguishes the organization from other organizations.” Organizational culture can be broken down into seven characteristics to help us better understand what it encompasses—innovation and risk-taking, attention to detail, outcome orientation, people orientation, team orientation, aggressiveness, and stability. All organizations have a culture, whether they have built it intentionally or not. All cultures grow from a system of core values—again, these can be selected and built into the organization intentionally, or they can grow up organically. In this essay, I will review the concepts of organizational culture with examples of three case studies across industries to show that with a deep-level understanding, organizational culture can be a tool for organizations or a hindrance, and that with enough dedication, and the willingness to wade through the complexities, it can be changed.
What Does Organizational Culture Help?
In an organization with a dominant culture, the core values are deeply held by the majority of members and give the organization its personality. Organizations can also have many kinds of subcultures (Robbins & Judge, 2016, p.267), which are often born when smaller groups within the organization need to solve problems that the larger organization does not encounter or does not yet have culturally accepted processes for. Strong cultures are known to create strong levels of agreement amongst employees about what the organization represents. This is important because this shared sense of purpose builds cohesiveness, loyalty and organizational commitment—which in turn lowers employees’ likelihood of leaving the organization, lowering turnover and impacting the organization financially in positive ways (Robbins & Judge, 2016, p. 268).
Culture can help to create climate, which can be explained as when employees share the same general feelings about what’s important and how well things are being done. When climate is strong, the sum of employee feelings can be stronger than individual feeling, resulting in increased positive outcomes for the organization and at the group level (Robbins & Judge, 2016, p. 269). Climate encompasses many dimension—including safety, communications styles, diversity and organizational justice. Studies have shown that climate can influence job satisfaction, motivation and turnover, all of which can, in turn, positively or negatively affect the bottom line of profitability for the company.
Climate, in turn, can affect the ethics of an organization, or the shared concepts of right and wrong behavior in the workplace. Group norms grow up quickly, and things that would otherwise seem out of place can become normalized in a group environment. Famous examples of organizations that created an unethical workplace environment include Enron and more recently, Uber. “An organization’s ethical climate powerfully influences the way its individual members feel they should behave, so much that researchers have been able to predict organizational outcomes from the climate categories.” (Robbins & Judge, 2016, p. 270). While ethical cultures can be difficult to build, they tend to take a long-term view of balancing rights and benefits of the individual, the group and the organization, rather than just one or the other kind of stakeholder above others.
Other components of organizational culture that are important to discuss are innovation and sustainability, areas that strong, positive cultures have an edge. While ethics and climate might be seen to benefit individuals and groups within the larger organization, innovation and sustainability benefit the organizational level in a significant way. “To create a truly sustainable business, an organization must develop a long-term culture and put its values into practice.” (Robbins & Judge, 2016, p. 270) More and more, as technology advancements continue to change the fabric of our society at lightning speed, organizations cannot be sustainable, or stand the test of time, if they are not innovative, as the disappearance of Blockbuster shows. When Disney found itself struggling against their increasingly hierarchical structure, they took extreme steps to counteract it—including bringing on completely new leadership from Pixar. The new leadership began by completely overhauling the organizations’ values and purpose, knowing from their experience at Pixar that while it does not seem related to the production of animated films, it would make all the difference. New team structures included an emphasis on blending different individual skills together into groups that would function rapidly and with innovation, resulting in overarching gains for the organization as a whole (Edmonson et al, 2015).
When Does Culture Hurt?
Organizational Culture is not all warm feelings and glasses of Kool aide, however, and there are many aspects of culture that, if left unchecked, can become detrimental to an organization, fostering a negative culture and ultimately negatively affecting its bottom line. Institutionalization, which can happen as companies grow in size or time in business, can mean that behaviors go unquestioned even when they are clearly not in keeping with the core values of that same organization. Institutionalization can, in turn, lead to barriers to change, diversity, and even cost companies when it comes to mergers and acquisitions.
Barriers to change and barriers to diversity cannot be emphasized enough when we talk about the potential harm that institutionalization, and the tendency to default to group behavior can cause. As we can see in the Henry Tam and the MGI Team case study (Polzer et al, 2003), an organization does not have to be large to suffer from the downsides of rigidity and sameness of thought. While the MGI team set out to create an innovative product, they surrounded themselves with people who came from similar backgrounds and were more likely to agree with. By surrounding themselves with 1) other Russians, and 2) others from HBS, they inadvertently created an environment where their sameness of thought led to groupthink and sharp divisions between in-groups and out groups. This lack of diversity of thought ended up causing harm to individuals on the team, like Dana, who could not get support for her ideas, the group dynamic, as they could not work together, and the organization, as their start-up could not progress fast enough to stay in business. The MGI founder team stuck rigidly to their ideas and failed to see how allowing outsiders to participate in different parts of the business, like the music even though they were not musicians, could have helped them gain a broader perspective on the entire project. This shift in diversity perspective is explained by Thomas and Ely as “only when companies start thinking about diversity more holistically—as providing fresh and meaningful approaches to work—and stop assuming that diversity relates simply to how a person looks or where he or she comes from, will they be able to reap its full rewards.” (Thomas & Ely, 2002, p. 3)
Conclusions for Change
At the end of the day, while studying organizational behavior can be fascinating, the real reason that we study organizational behavior is in order to better develop organizations or, when it gets off track, to change it. Organizational change is a large topic and there are many approaches to managing cultural change—though most agree that it is a long, complex process and is often not done successfully. Once again, because the world we live in is now moving at a breakneck pace, a focus on building a learning organization and creating a culture for change is something that should demand the focus of organizational leaders and their direct teams.
Kotter (Robbins & Judge, 2016) and others have theorized about how intensive of a process it can be to create lasting organizational change, and Kotter’s 8-step framework can help leaders to begin to wrap their heads around how to plan and execute such transformations. A look at the Yelp case study ((Luca et al, 2017) as an example can help to illuminate how intensive the process can be for creating change. As the founders of Yelp became concerned with the industry-wide lack of diversity, they hired someone to be their change agent. Rachel then began the intensive process of evaluation, building coalitions for change, and getting more recommendations from experts, all part of Kotter’s model for successful change. Rachel’s inclusion of a ‘listening tour’ into her process of change is a great example of how she was paying attention to both individual needs and balancing them against the greater organizational needs, rather than just trying to pronounce changes and expect results without buy-in (Luca et al, 2017).
Returning to our opening example of how sexual assault and harassment has come to be seen as intrinsically tied into American military culture seems especially relevant in late 2020, and in the wake of major organizational failures which have resulted in increased pressure to transform all four branches of the US Military. But even on issues that we can all agree on, why is culture so difficult to change. From this class, I have learned that the answer starts with looking at three levels—individual, group, and organizational level—and then deliberately conducting a change process that will target the desired change. Change will never be achieved without individuals being willing to look at their own biases and work together in coalitions. It takes the top leadership in an organization putting emphasis on values and how those values get filtered into everyday decisions, at creating group buy in, and in honoring failure in order to create a learning organization. The example set by Disney, going from an organization somewhat set in its ways and struggling, to an organization now known for being both at the cutting edge of technological advancements plus having a strong and positive culture, can be used as a roadmap for other leaders hoping to launch big, structural changes.
References
Luca, Michael, Schwartzstein, Joshua, and Subramani, Gauri. “Managing Diversity and Inclusion at Yelp." Harvard Business School Case 918-009, August 2017.
Robbins, Stephen P, and Judge, Timothy A . Essentials of Organizational Behavior, by Stephen P. Robbins and Tim Judge, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, 2010.
Thomas David A, and Ely, Robin J. Making Differences Matter: A New Paradigm for Managing Diversity. 29 Apr. 2016, hbr.org/1996/09/making-differences-matter-a-new-paradigm-for-managing-diversity.
Polzer, Jeffrey T, Vargas, Ingrid, and Elfenbein, Hillary A. “Henry Tam and the MGI Team.” Harvard Business School Case 404-068, 2003.
Edmondson, Amy C, Ager, David L, Harburg, Emily, Bartlett, Natalie. “Teaming at Disney Animation”. Harvard Business School Case 9-615-023, May 18, 2015
