Organizational Culture: the Distribution of Cultural Constraints
Organizational Culture as Reality Construction, Explanation, and Constraint
Here are more ways to look at organizational culture that facilitate cultural transformations by intervention into patterns.
What we call an organization’s “culture” can be described as the patterns, the invariances, in how individuals in that organization construct reality: the values, goals, and assumptions that are held by more than one person in the organization.
The level at which we decide to address a cultural change is a function of how widely spread the cultural phenomenon in question is.
Is this a pattern that can be described about one manager, or is it a pattern found in a department, or in the whole organization?
We can start to see that the ways in which patterns are distributed across an organization contribute to the “holographic” nature of culture that allows us to intervene in one part of an organization, and in doing so, affect others.
—Ellen, editor of Change
Organizational Culture: the Distribution of Cultural Constraints
Organizational Culture as Reality Construction
Many regularities or invariances—patterns—of an organization’s behaviour can be simply described without any reference to its people’s common values, goals, assumptions, and ways to seeing the world.
Others cannot. For a good many of the patterns that can be described involve patterns of valuing, patterns of goal-seeking, patterns of presuppositions or tacit assumptions from which people operate, and patterns of framing or construing reality. Many of the behavioral invariances that constitute an organization’s unique culture, in short, are patterns in the way individuals in the organization habitually construct organizational reality for themselves. The commonalities in their individual patterns of reality-construction—the area of overlap, if you will—constitute a shared organizational reality which, again, marks the organization out from others, and gives it a different “flavour” or “feel.”
This shared, mutually constructed reality is also the reality within which the organization chiefly operates, and is the chief source of constraints on what is possible for the organization. “In view of this, it can be said that it is misleading to suggest that organizations need to ‘adapt’ to their environment…, or that environments ‘select’ the organizations that are to survive…. Both views tend to make organizations and their members dependent upon forces operating in an external world, rather than recognizing that they are active agents operating with others in the construction of that world.”1 Everything comes to play a part in this constructed, ‘second-order’ organizational reality, from corporate philosophy and company myths, to favoured company metaphors and jargon, right through to the particular accounting conventions and associated measurements by which the corporate ship is steered. And, notoriously, there are more possibilities for your organization and its managers in heaven and earth than there are dreamt of in your philosophy, or ratios.
Organizational Culture as Explanation
When observing the behaviour of any individual manager, numerous patterns can be found. He always does things this way, and never that way. Now many of these may be peculiar to him or her: “That’s Sheila for you.” Other patterns are found to be common to managers throughout the organization. These latter, cultural patterns can thus be used as explanations, fitting the individual behaviour observed to what we know about the wider patterns of behaviour within the organization: “That’s Shell for you.” It is often useful to know whether the patterns observed are peculiar to the individual or are, on the contrary, part of the culture of the organization, or, indeed, indigenous to the Group. For example, there is a very distinctive SUKO (Shell U.K. Oil) culture, and also an equally distinctive (Group) Shell culture overlaying it, and it is frequently helpful to locate the more specific patterns that interest us correctly within the right broader pattern, at least if one is interested in looking for the most useful points of intervention.
Organizational Culture as Constraint
An alternative to the “rules” metaphor for looking at pattern is the (not unrelated) concept of constraint. Patterned behaviour is said to be invariant, but what this means is that the behaviour does indeed vary but only within certain clearly describable, clearly definable limits or constraints. Even when things change, they change within the bounds of those selfsame constraints, hence, “plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.”
If we want to open up new possibilities through genuinely new departures in organizational behaviour within the firm, this means transcending those constraints. So here comes our first clue about implications for organizational change: If those same constraints operate throughout the organization, holographically, and we want to transcend those constraints right across the board, we can do so by transforming the relevant pattern that forms part of the organization’s culture. And as should become more obvious, it is no more difficult to transform an organization-wide pattern in one fell swoop than to transform one localized instance of it (for a pattern is a pattern is a pattern). In fact, for perhaps obvious reasons, it is a good deal easier: a transformed part may soon find its own transformation reversed or neutralized through the actions of the untransformed whole. (Perhaps successful Reformations are but heresies with Napoleonic ambitions.)
This post has been adapted from “How Change has Changed: Organizational Culture and Justified Intervention,” by James Wilk
© Copyright 1987, 2022 Dr James Wilk
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Morgan G (1986) Images of Organization, London: Sage. p 74