Why Bother Transforming Organizational Culture?
Because it's your quickest, easiest, laziest option
Following last week’s post on organizational culture as context, we are ready at last to consider a few of the implications for organizational transformation of the way we have been looking at organizational culture. However, first there is one question we ought to at least give some thought to, namely, why bother trying to transform organizational culture at all?
Well, in the first place, most of the time we would not want to. You cannot not have an organizational culture, and for most purposes, most of the time, an organization’s particular culture serves it pretty well.
After all, it has evolved, organically, over time, and has its own unique coherence that contributes in a positive way to making the organization what it is. A company’s existing organizational culture can be one of its greatest strengths, a major—albeit frequently not fully tapped—source of competitive advantage.
And note too that there is nothing wrong in the fact that organizational behaviour is rigidly patterned; for otherwise, all would be chaos. It is the patterning of organizational life that makes it workable at all.
Which is not to say that organizations should operate in rigid, rule-bound, ways. On the contrary, it is only to suggest that even the most flexibly organized firm must rely on rigid (which is only to say reliable, predictable, regular) patterns of flexible operation. The point of intervening in rigid patterns is not to make them somehow less rigid but to substitute new rigid patterns that are more workable, allowing a more appropriate range of options.
Intervention into the existing culture of an organization is only justified when, in specific, identifiable ways, the culture is not working. If the organization is trying to steer a course towards certain goals and away from certain potential obstacles, this may require a change in patterns of organizational behaviour. The constraints on change that are involved are more likely to be organizational than individual.
It is a well-known phenomenon in organizations that individually creative, intelligent, resourceful managers can, within the confines of an organization and its constraining culture, exercise only a minute fraction of their potential.
It is a far longer way ’round to work on ‘developing’ individual managers one at a time, or one team at a time, than to intervene contextually to remove unnecessary organizational constraints—at the “cultural” level—and thereby liberate individual potential across the board.
In other words, it is the culture and not individual managers that could well do with reforming. And to re-form the culture may require only the identification and manipulation of a couple of key context-markers, a process that may require very little indeed in the way of organizational time and resources, though requiring a great deal of careful thinking to specify the minimal action ultimately required.
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