Page 326 - Managing Change in Organizations

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What is organization culture?
3 Organizational structures. Reporting lines, hierarchies, work flows.
4 Power structures. Who makes the decisions, how widely spread is power and on
what are power and influence based?
5 Symbols. Logos and designs, office allocation, car parking and other tangible
and intangible means of differentiating people.
6 Rituals and routines. Meetings, reports, budget and performance review
processes.
7 Stories and myths. Convey messages about what is important and valued in an
organization.
While not denying that organizations are cultural entities, it ought to be noted that
the underlying consequence of there being such cultural assumptions could be to
stifle dissent and limit innovation. In any event organizations are certainly only
rarely capable of being understood as a single, homogenous culture. This brings
with it the prospect of cultural differentiation and adaptation via what would in
effect be a process of evolution. Evolutionary explanations of change attract some
interest (see below). For the moment, however, we need to note that the idea that
a leadership team can change the culture of an organization is very contentious.
Parker (2000) observes that many of the ideas behind organization culture theories
are not new depending as they do on the well-known tensions between cultural
and structural or informal and formal explanations of behaviour in organizations.
With this in mind note that one of the often contending explanations for the
famous Hawthorne research lies in a cultural explanation different to those
offered by Mayo, Roethlisberger and Dickson and others. You will recall that the
Hawthorne experiments started in consequence of an earlier study in the same
factory looking at the impact of lighting on the productivity of workers engaged
in tasks demanding physical skills. Gains were observed as lighting levels were
increased. Then lighting levels were reduced. Even so further gains were recorded,
only stemmed when lighting levels were reduced to the level of moonlight. Social
factors were believed to be the explanation. The famous ‘relay assembly test room
study’ was set up to investigate these factors in greater depth. The results of this
latter study were reported in great detail (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939).

Taken together, the results of this and later studies at Hawthorne were taken as a
demonstration that social factors explain performance more fully than various
economic explanations including the operation of incentive schemes. These social
factors were in-group factors such as ‘group pressure’. Thus the social explanation
did not relate to factors we might associate with corporate culture as such.
There have long been various contending explanations for these results (see
Sofer (1973) for an excellent summary). But Zinn (1980) offers an explanation of
interest to those interested in cultural factors. The relay assembly test room oper-
ators were female workers in the Hawthorne factory, a Western Electric factory in
outer Chicago. The majority were recent immigrants whose English language
skills were relatively poor. They were often the main income earner in their fam-
ily. Economic pressure, mediated by the experience of being a relatively recently
arrived immigrant and therefore not fully socially adjusted, may well offer an
explanation as to why group pressure was so important. The group incentive

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