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Organizational Behaviour (OB) and Organizational Culture (OC)
What is organization in simple words?
Organization (British English: Organisation) is the idea of putting things together in a logical order. The verb is "to organize". An organization is a group of people who work together. Organizations exist because people working together can achieve more than a person working alone.
- A tool used by people to coordinate their actions to obtain something they desire or value.
- Organizations bring together people and resources to produce products and services.
- Organizations provide goods and services. Organizations employ people.
- Basically, organizations exist to create value.
What is Organizational Behaviour?
Is the systematic study and application of knowledge about how individuals and groups act within the organizations where they work.
Organization Behaviour Chart
- If I want to understand my boss's personality, I would be examining the individual level of analysis.
- If we want to know about how my manager‘s personality affects my team, I am examining things at the team level.
- But, if I want to understand how my organization‘s culture affects my boss‘s behaviour, I would be interested in the organizational level of analysis.
OB draws from other disciplines to create a unique field:
Personality and Motivation – Psychology.
Team/group processes – Sociology.
Decision making – Influence of Economics.
Power and influence in organizations – Political sciences.
Stress and its effects on individuals – Medical Science.
Attitude change, Group process – Social Psychology.
Individual culture, organizational culture – Anthropology.
Importance of OB
OB provides road map to our life in organizations.
OB uses scientific research to help understand and predict organizational life.
OB helps us influence organizational events.
OB helps understand himself and others better.
OB helps to understand the basis of motivation.
Culture
Culture is a phenomenon that surrounds us all. Culture is the unique dominant pattern of shared beliefs, assumptions, values, and norms that shape the socialization, symbols, language and practices of a group of people.
The attitudes and approaches that typify the way staff carry out their tasks.
Culture is developed and transmitted by people, consciously and unconsciously, to subsequent generations.
Culture helps us understand how it is created, embedded, developed, manipulated, managed, and changed.
To understand the culture means to understand the organization. Culture defines leadership.
What must be for culture to exist?
- It must be shared by the vast majority of members of a group or society;
- It must be passed on from generation to generation; and
- It must shape behaviour and perceptions.
Apes in a cage
“Culture is how organizations ‘do things’.” — Robbie Katanga
Culture is consistent, observable patterns of behaviour in organizations. Aristotle said, “We are what we repeatedly do.” This view elevates repeated behaviour or habits as the core of culture and deemphasizes what people feel, think or believe. It also focuses our attention on the forces that shape behaviour in organizations, and so highlights an important question: are all those forces (including structure, processes, and incentives) “culture” or is culture simply the behavioural outputs?
“In large part, culture is a product of compensation.” — Alec Haverstick
Culture is powerfully shaped by incentives. The best predictor of what people will do is what they are incentivized to do. By incentives, we mean here the full set of incentives — monetary rewards, non- monetary rewards such as status, recognition and advancement, and sanctions — to which members of the organization are subject. But where do incentives come from? As with the previous definition, there are potential chicken-and-egg issues. Are patterns of behaviour the product of incentives, or have incentives been shaped in fundamental ways by beliefs and values that underpin the culture?
“Organizational culture defines a jointly shared description of an organization from within.” — Bruce Perron
Culture is a process of “sense-making” in organizations. Sense-making has been defined as “a collaborative process of creating shared awareness and understanding out of different individuals’ perspectives and varied interests.” Note that this moves the definition of culture beyond patterns of behaviour into the realm of jointly-held beliefs and interpretations about “what is.” It says that a crucial purpose of culture is to help orient its members to “reality” in ways that provide a basis for alignment of purpose and shared action.
“Organizational culture is the sum of values and rituals which serve as ‘glue’ to integrate the members of the organization.” — Richard Perrin
Culture is a carrier of meaning. Cultures provide not only a shared view of “what is” but also of “why is.” In this view, culture is about “the story” in which people in the organization are embedded, and the values and rituals that reinforce that narrative. It also focuses attention on the importance of symbols and the need to understand them — including the idiosyncratic languages used in organizations — in order to understand culture.
“Organizational culture is civilization in the workplace.” — Alan Adler
Culture is a social control system. Here the focus is the role of culture in promoting and reinforcing “right” thinking and behaving, and sanctioning “wrong” thinking and behaving. Key in this definition of culture is the idea of behavioural “norms” that must be upheld, and associated social sanctions that are imposed on those who don’t “stay within the lines.” This view also focuses attention on how the evolution of the organization shaped the culture. That is, how have the existing norms promoted the survival of the organization in the past? Note: implicit in this evolutionary view is the idea that established cultures can become impediments to survival when there are substantial environmental changes.
“Culture is the organization’s immune system.” — Michael Watkins
Culture is a form of protection that has evolved from situational pressures. It prevents “wrong thinking” and “wrong people” from entering the organization in the first place. It says that organizational culture functions much like the human immune system in preventing viruses and bacteria from taking hold and damaging the body. The problem, of course, is that organizational immune systems also can attack agents of needed change, and this has important implications for on- boarding and integrating people into organizations.
In the discussion, there were also some important observations pushing against the view of culture as something that it is unitary and static, and toward a view that cultures are multiple, overlapping, and dynamic.
“Organizational culture [is shaped by] the main culture of the society we live in, albeit with greater emphasis on particular parts of it.” — Elizabeth Skringar
Organizational culture is shaped by and overlaps with other cultures — especially the broader culture of the societies in which it operates. This observation highlights the challenges that global organizations face in establishing and maintaining a unified culture when operating in the context of multiple national, regional and local cultures. How should leaders strike the right balance between promoting “one culture” in the organization, while still allowing for influences of local cultures?
“It over simplifies the situation in large organizations to assume there is only one culture… and it’s risky for new leaders to ignore the sub-cultures.” — Rolf Winkler
The cultures of organizations are never monolithic. There are many factors that drive internal variations in the culture of business functions (e.g. finance vs. marketing) and units (e.g. a fast- moving consumer products division vs. a pharmaceuticals division of a diversified firm). A company’s history of acquisition also figures importantly in defining its culture and sub-cultures. Depending on how acquisition and integration are managed, the legacy cultures of acquired units can persist for surprisingly long periods of time.
“An organization [is] a living culture… that can adapt to the reality as fast as possible.” — Abdi Osman Jama
Finally, cultures are dynamic. They shift, incrementally and constantly, in response to external and internal changes. So, trying to assess organizational culture is complicated by the reality that you are trying to hit a moving target. But it also opens the possibility that culture change can be managed as a continuous process rather than through big shifts (often in response to crises). Likewise, it highlights the idea that a stable “destination” may never — indeed should never — be reached. The culture of the organization should always be learning and developing.
These perspectives provide the kind of holistic, nuanced view of organizational culture that is needed by leaders in order to truly understand their organizations — and to have any hope of changing them for the better.
The Significance of Organizational Culture http://www.knowledge-management- tools.net/organizational-culture.html
Finally, internal competition is yet another aspect of organizational culture that may interfere with the knowledge sharing and knowledge creation process.
The Problems with Managing Organizational Culture
The problems with managing culture can be summed up as follows:
- Culture reaffirms itself by rejecting misfits and promoting those that adhere to the norms of the organization (Gamble & Blackwell 2001).
- Culture often consists of learned responses that are hard wired into the organization. The actual events that sparked this "lesson" may be long forgotten (Wellman 2009). This is very similar to the concept of organizational learning according to Levitt and March (1996) which indicates that organizations are far more likely to remember interpretations of events rather than the event itself.
- Culture contains falsehoods. Past lessons are applied often without understanding them and their reasons for being.
Organizational culture can be explored with the use of questions
In what way people act together on different levels of the organization, coworkers, superiors with subordinates?
What action is rewarded, punished or tolerated in the organization?
What kinds of people are successful, what kinds of people have the problems?
What are the customs, traditions, stories, jokes, heroes?
What are the symbols, mottos of organization?
What way are people dressed, how are decorated the workplaces, is there a specific way to design buildings?
Strong and weak organizational (firm) culture
Organizational culture has normative meaning. Specifies what behaviour is expected from members of the organization, what behaviour will be punished and what is valued.
Strong organizational (firm) culture there is, if these criteria are clear and unambiguous and are adopted by a large majority of members of the Organization.
In a weak organizational (firm) culture there are not the standards behaviour, there is little alignment with organizational values and control must be exercised through extensive procedures and bureaucracy.
For more on how to manage organizational culture, please see for example the subsection on organizational culture change.
Read more: http://www.knowledge-management-tools.net/organizational- culture.html#ixzz4QA0tdK7k
Sources
King, Daniel, and Scott Lawley. (2016) Organizational Behaviour. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Second edition. ISBN 978-0-19-872402-5.
Baron, Robert A., and Greenberg, Jerald. Behaviour in organizations – 9th edition. Pearson Education Inc., New Jersey: 2008. p.
Moorhead, G., & Griffin, R. W. (1995). Organizational behaviour: Managing people and organizations (5th edition). Boston. Houghton Mifflin.
Wagner, J. A., & Hollenbeck, J. R. (2010). Organizational behaviour: Securing competitive advantage. New York: Routledge.
Hofstede, Geert (1991), Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind. , McGraw-Hill Professional
Organizational culture and leadership. Edited by Edgar H. Schein. 4th ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010. xvi, 436 p. ISBN 9780470185865.
Cameron, Kim S. & Quinn, Robert E. (2011). Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework. 3rd ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
