Page 337 - Cultures and Organizations

302 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

with the lightest shades and gradually move toward darker ones, postpon-
ing the need for an overall cleaning round as long as possible.
The design and sales manager tried to satisfy his customers in a highly

competitive market. These fashion clothing firms were notorious for short-
term planning changes. As their supplier, the printing company often got
requests for rush orders. Even when these orders were small and unlikely
to be profi table, the sales manager hated to say no; the customer might go

to a competitor, and then the printing firm would miss out on that big order
that the sales manager was sure would come afterward. The rush orders,
however, usually upset the manufacturing manager’s schedules and forced
him to print short runs of dark color sets on a beautifully clean machine,
thus forcing the production operators to start cleaning all over again.
There were frequent disagreements between the two managers over
whether a certain rush order should or should not be taken into production.

The conflict was not limited to the department heads: production person-
nel publicly expressed doubts about the competence of the salespeople, and
vice versa. In the cafeteria the production workers and salespeople would
not sit together, although they had known each other for years.

Implicit Models of Organizations

This story describes a banal problem of a kind that occurs regularly in all
types of organizations. As with most other organization problems, it has
both structural and human aspects. The people involved react according
to their mental software. Part of this mental software consists of people’s
ideas about what an organization should be like.
From the dimensions of national culture described in Chapters 3 through
6, power distance and uncertainty avoidance in particular affect our thinking

about organizations. Organizing always requires answering two questions:
(1) who has the power to decide what? and (2) what rules or procedures will

be followed to attain the desired ends? The answer to the first question is
influenced by cultural norms of power distance; the answer to the second

question, by cultural norms about uncertainty avoidance. The remaining two
dimensions, individualism and masculinity, affect our thinking about people
in organizations, rather than about organizations themselves.
Power distance (PDI) and uncertainty avoidance (UAI) have been plot-
ted against each other in Figure 9.1, and if the preceding analysis is cor-
rect, the position of a country in this diagram should tell us something
about the country’s way of solving organizational problems.