Page 325 - Managing Change in Organizations

CarnCh17v3.qxd 3/30/07 4:37 PM Page 308

Chapter 17 ■ Culture models and organization change
USA and the challenge to the economic supremacy of the USA from Japan in par-
ticular. He argued that the culture concept offers a new way of understanding
organizations. The use of corporate culture appeared to offer analytical possibilities
for explaining the success of Japanese companies, at least in the 1960s and 1970s.
Of course, there were other feasible explanations, not least the need for Japan and
Germany to re-equip their industry after the war, but these were deemed to be
insufficient in themselves to explain the observable differences in performance and
success. It is worth noting that literally hundreds of research studies seeking to
explain organizational performance by looking at structure, innovation, technol-
ogy, size, adaptation and so on tended to reveal statistically significant correlations.
However, it was also true that the factors studied provided an explanation of only
part of the variance in the dependent variable, commonly a ‘bundle’ of perform-
ance measures. Researchers concluded that some other factor, not being measured,
was at work. It was not a long stretch from that position to conclude that the miss-
ing variable was culture.
Of course, such a view possessed powerful ‘face validity’. Just as the ‘frontier
spirit’ thought to engender values of self-reliance, independence and enterprise
was thought to have been instrumental in the growth of American business, so
observers now sought similar explanations for the success of Japanese enterprise
in ‘consensus management’ Japanese style, alongside the adoption by Japanese
corporations of American ideas such as total quality management combined
eventually with the ‘Toyota Manufacturing System’ incorporating ideas which
came to be known as ‘lean thinking’, ‘Kanban’ and so on. While the explanation
ultimately relates to changes in the way work is arranged, the argument for why
Japanese enterprises achieved advantage by making these changes first was seen
to include culture as one important source of explanation.

What is organization culture?

Organization culture is commonly defined as the attitudes, values, beliefs, norms and
customs which distinguish an organization from others. Organization culture is intan-
gible and difficult to measure. In fact there are many ways of defining organization

culture. Elliot Jacques (1952) referred to ‘customary and traditional ways of thinking
and doing things ’, noting that new employees must learn to adopt them sufficiently
to gain acceptance in the organization. Schwartz and Davis (1981) note that culture is
both about beliefs and expectations while Lorsch (1986) refers to the beliefs of ‘top
managers’. Conversely, Kotter and Hesketh (1992) note the importance of community
and its preservation within any definition of culture, effectively arguing that the urge
to create identity and ensure survival are what gives a culture impact.
Johnson (1988) sets out a ‘cultural web’ noting a number of components
which help in the definition of organization culture:
1 The organizational paradigm. What an organization does–its mission, its values
and how it defines itself.
2 Control systems. Processes in place to monitor performance and/or behaviour.
Role cultures have many formal controls, rules and procedures, for example.

308