Page 400 - Cultures and Organizations

The Elephant and the Stork: Organizational Cultures 365

fessional groups were the most job oriented, professional, open, tightly
controlled, and pragmatic; the administrative groups the most paro-
chial and normative; the customer interface groups the most results and
employee oriented, closed, and loosely controlled. The customer interface
subculture represented a counterculture to the professional culture.
Just before the survey was conducted, the company had gone through
two cases of internal rebellion: from the salespeople and from the women.

The sales rebellion had been a conflict about working conditions and
compensation; a sales strike had only just been prevented. This problem
can be understood from the wide gap between the professional and cus-
tomer interface subcultures. This rift on the culture map of the company
proved dangerous. The customer interface people generate the business—
without them, an insurance company cannot survive. The managers and
professionals who made the key decisions in this company belonged to
a notably different subculture: a high-profi le, glorified environment in

which big money, business trends, and market power were daily con-
cerns—far from the crowd who did the actual work and brought in the
daily earnings.
The women’s rebellion was about a lack of careers for women, and it
happened when the share of female employees had passed the 50 percent
mark. The rebellion can be understood by looking at the gap between the
professional and the administrative subcultures. Management, from their
professional subculture, saw women as belonging to the administrative
subculture: employees in routine jobs, not upwardly mobile. But this image
was no longer accurate, if it had ever been so. Of the 1,700 women in the
company, 700 had a higher education; many worked in professional roles,
and even those in administrative roles were nearly as much interested in a
career as their male colleagues. The interviews had revealed that manag-
ers believed most women to experience conflicts between their work and

their private and family lives. The survey, however, showed that whereas 21
percent of the women employees claimed to suffer from such confl icts, 30
percent of the men did. The women’s explanation of this result was that if
a woman took a job, she had to have her family problems resolved, whereas
many men never consciously resolved them.
For an understanding of the culture of this insurance company, the
subculture split was essential. Unfortunately, the members of manage-
ment—caught in their professional culture—did not recognize the alarm-
ing aspects of the culture rifts. They took little action as a result of the