Page 331 - Managing Change in Organizations

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Chapter 17 ■ Culture models and organization change
■ Achieved status vs ascribed status. Value is seen in who people are or in the posi-
tion they hold.
■ Sequential time vs synchronic time. Attention to people and problems in
sequence or jointly.
The connections between this study and the Hofstede work are evident enough but
it seems clear that Trompenars’ work has application to corporate culture generally.
Thus, for example, where ascribed status is important in defining people’s worth in
a given organizational setting there have to be real questions about how easy it
would be to introduce change because change would be likely to undermine those
definitions of worth. While his concern was with the sources of national cultural
difference it seems clear that the model reveals much about corporate culture.
It is clear that attitudes to risk, the feedback people get and the timescales asso-
ciated with feedback are all important factors in understanding the emerging
complexity to which Schein also directs our attention. It is also probably true
that we ought to examine the mechanisms through which cultures are formed
because while these factors clearly are important they can hardly be used to
explain the emergence of long lasting cultures. For example, it would stretch
incredulity to claim that the attitude to risk remains stable over time, as between
generations of employees, but we would need to believe that to be true if we were
to explain the emergence of a particular culture on that basis.
Both the ABF Ltd and International Engineering cases (see pages 178 and 142
respectively) provide examples of this more detailed analysis. Particularly interesting
is the point about ‘fear of failure’; the pressures are dual in nature. On the one hand
the short-term approach combined with a functional or departmental orientation,
centralization and autocratic management styles creates a powerful tendency to
limit risk taking. On the other, managers moving rapidly through careers and not
having to face up to their mistakes do not learn the interpersonal skills needed to do
so. They find facing up to performance issues difficult. Therefore, when forced to do
so by those same short-term pressures, they often do so inadequately and in a
volatile, even primitive, fashion (ABF Ltd). This further reduces risk taking, over time
creating an organization within which the ‘fear of failure’ is very high indeed. Thus,
where a problematic culture emerges it may be difficult to change. Indeed it seems

clear that to change culture we must work on the mind-set or mental programming
within the organization. However, it does appear that we can do so. The key seems
to be that of getting people to focus on shared problems. Developing new solutions
and supporting their successful implementation helps. Most importantly we can aid
the creation of new mind-sets by identifying ‘tacit’ knowledge which already exists
in the organization, converting it to new explicit knowledge and encouraging its use
in problem solving. Thus new possibilities are created – engendering mind-set
change not by seeking to destroy the current mind-set but, rather, by adding new
ideas; by focusing on solutions and not on failure.

Goffee and Jones

Goffee and Jones (1996) offer another approach to the analysis of culture. For
them culture is about the presence (or absence) of community. Building on the
ideas of social theorists such as Durkheim they argue that sociability (the
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