Organizations Need Strong Culture - Essay Example

Organizations need strong culture Today’s world is progressing towards inclusion to open source information and conservatism oriented era termed as Post bureaucratic era. The engagement of government into democratic movements and act policies are stifled towards innovation and the democracy is moving towards conservatism where people believe in mostly that matter to them only. The conservative government thus reformed considers the provision of all significant parliamentary information in a format that is open source and easily accessible. The demand of this era is to burn and tear down everything that comes as a hindrance between the politics and the public (Cameron, 2009). An organization always needs a strong culture to actively and efficiently head towards its goals along with the employees and company policies through a post bureaucratic era. The aim of this paper is to explain the mainstream approach to organization culture. Here the managers always work to maintain right values, ethics, code of conduct and norms. Culture is the top priority for organizations where culture management, ensuring employees to follow the organization’s culture leading to organizational success. Values, norms and ethics vary among organizations when organizations are treated as different states. All of these organizations have different value sets and norms leading to differing systems and structures (Brewis, 2007). Culture, therefore, provides a common sense to the organization that enables the human resource to delineate ways to how to act and when and where to act. Organizational culture is responsible for bringing an organization to life as all the strategies, policies, regulations must be synchronized with the culture and the employees and managers (the alive participants) of the organization keeps the culture alive by following it. Organizational culture is therefore written and stored in the form of job descriptions, procedures, strategies etc. But if there arises a conflict between the documented and the practiced norms, values, and beliefs practiced within an organization, serious conflicts may occur leading to disastrous effects. The people will drift away from the formal rules at workplace. Organizational culture comprises of values and sets of beliefs that directly and predominantly originate from people’s minds identified as cultural artefacts (Brewis, 2007). Cultural artefacts are somewhat tangible and more material embodiment of organizational culture consisting of: Types of people employed (their personalities, academic background etc) Traditions and rituals, Technology, Architecture, Heroes, Stories and myths According to Schein, among the three levels of culture, artefacts forms the tip of the iceberg, that is the visible part keeping hence, the two other parts way behind and hidden beneath. Values refer to answering questions such as what we are doing actually and why are we doing it this particular way? These questions evoke ethical dilemmas of rightness and wrongness. Therefore an organization propose values of equality, un-biasness, resolving human conflicts and problems, technology application that can be accessed and reformed through direct questioning. Cultural change in organizations may take different forms and possess different aims. Organizations undergoing cultural changes may not turn out the way as expected. UK’s major retailing business went through cultural change via human resource management policies applying directly at the low level management staff mostly including the labourers and low paid staff that didn’t turn out to be fruitful. Previous cultural changes were also directed at the shop keeper and worker level (Brewis; Ogbonna and Wilkinson, 2003). With these shop keepers etc the part time job is not the core part of their lives. Therefore planned cultural changes are the essence of successful organizational cultures when applied at managerial and more professional levels in organizations, as these managers are found to be more likely positively attending to the cultural change. Planned cultural change is a far difficult phenomenon as it directly depends on the conditions of the industry and other parameters of organization (Ogbonna and Wilkinson, 2003). Thus according to critics, cultural changes not only create serious ethical dilemmas but also serious conflicts and consequences for the individuals and organizations (Brewis, 2007). Mangers are treated as the agents for any cultural change and not the targets. This means that there is no adequate work on studying mangers’ experiences and responses to planned cultural change. During cultural change discussions, Control is an issue that arises significantly. Control was studied during cultural change at STARWOW. The mangers were interviewed and they expressed the cultural change as lack of empowerment and strategically controlled systems by the heads. The employees felt that after the cultural change management teams started interfering in controlling and monitoring day to day activities as they were pressurized by the cultural change rather than purely relying on commercial performance (Ogbonna and Wilkinson, 2003). The mangers felt they were being policed and they stated that they were closely monitored and even warned on little over spending. They were even asked how they resolved and planned to resolve a particular problem formally. The manger’s autonomy to control and monitor functions was shifted to the centralized purchasing and distribution department and other major functions. Such control and centralization as a consequence of cultural change at STARWOW disabled the managers to give feedback on absenteeism, recruitment, labourer turnover etc. They were even disrespected at the headquarters and they felt as just the whipping force. The mangers had different views to this control part of cultural change, the regional managers and store mangers directly oppose the control part one being with the control and the other going against to the control. According to another study an information intensive firm possess control at two layers. These two layers are termed as technocratic control and socio-ideological control. The technocratic control is discussed here. Technocratic control is used for measuring the performance and in context to bureaucracy. An organizational culture having technocratic control exhibits following characteristics in structural arrangements: -hierarchy -regulated career paths -feedback procedures -work methodologies The technocratic control is mainly exercised at the behavioural level when measuring performance. But the latter part of technocratic control, bureaucracy exerts ideological power as well (Alvesson and K¨arreman, 2004). The shared similarities, shared methodologies, work systems, hierarchies, procedures of reporting in technocratic control lead to shared identities which rather means the loosening of the iron bureaucratic cage. This is interpreted as degrees of freedom given to organizational employees. Whether the cage is loosening or tightening it all depends on the iron metal cage of employees. If they have positive perceptions of the company and they are motivated to work, then they are more inclined towards identification (K¨arreman and Alvesson, 2004) which includes recognitions, respect and internalization of employees. The above four points have explained how an organizational culture builds the value for its employees, motivates and aligns the human resources and directs them to one direction. The values of the organizational culture must be attainable and agreeable by its employees and its enforcement is not made by pressurizing the employees rather the employees are motivated to act and follow, accordingly. The values and beliefs must be in line to the formally documented principles and guidelines so no ethical dilemma may arise during its active participation at workplace by the employees. The cultural change must be planned and it must not be against the values of the people. The cultural change must bring the people together under one shed, rather than segregating them into different opinion groups. A planned cultural change is significant to organizational excellence and success. The factor of control as a consequence of cultural change must be evoked when and where necessary. If centralization is required and lesser risks are involved then go for it else if the employees are feeling policed, control must be either loosened or communication must be enhanced as when employees feel respectful they work for the organization with loyalty and don’t speak ill of the organization. Lastly employees must be given chance of identification and respect under bureaucratic era. Sources: BREWIS, J. (2007). Culture. In Knights, D., & Willmott, H. Introducing Organizational Behaviour And Management, London, Thomson. CAMERON, D. (2009, May 25). A new politics: The post-bureaucratic age | David Cameron | Comment is free | The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/25/david-cameron-a-new-politics3 . K®ARREMAN, D., & ALVESSON, M. (2004). Cages in Tandem: Management Control, Social Identity, and Identification in a Knowledge-Intensive Firm.Organization. 11, 149-175. OGBONNA, E., & WILKINSON, B. (2003). The False Promise of Organizational Culture Change: A Case Study of Middle Managers in Grocery Retailing*.Journal of Management Studies, 40(5), 1151-1178. Read More