Group Formation Process – Stage 2: Building Norms Around Intimacy

As the group solves the problem of authority, begins to share leadership, and accomplishes some tasks successfully, it begins to operate in terms of another unconscious assumptions that we are the best group, and we all like each other. Turquet (1973) used the term fusion to reflect a strong emotional need to feel merged

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Group Formation Process – Stage 3: Group Work and Functional Familiarity

If the group deals successfully with the fusion assumption, it usually achieves an emotional state that can best be characterized as mutual accep­tance ’ The group will have had enough experience so that members not only know what to expect of each other—what we can think of as “func­tional familiarity”—but also will have had

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Group Formation Process – Stage 4: Group Maturity

Only a few remarks will be made about this final group stage because it will receive much more focus in later chapters. If a group works successfully, it will inevitable reinforce its assumptions about itself and its environment, thus strengthening whatever culture it has developed. Because culture is a learned set of responses, culture

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Culture Beginnings Through Founder/Leader Actions

Cultures basically spring from three sources: (1) the beliefs, values, and assumptions of founders of organizations; (2) the learning experiences of group members as their organization evolves; and (3) new beliefs, values, and assumptions brought in by new members and new leaders. Though each of these mechanisms plays a crucial role, by far the

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Culture Beginnings Through Founder/Leader Actions: Sam Steinberg

Sam Steinberg was an immigrant whose parents had started a corner grocery store in Montreal. His parents, particularly his mother, taught him some basic attitudes toward customers and helped him form the vision that he could succeed in building a successful enterprise. He assumed from the beginning that if he did things right, he

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Culture Beginnings Through Founder/Leader Actions: Fred Smithfield Enterprises

Smithfield built a chain of financial service organizations using sophisti­cated financial analysis techniques in an area of the country where insur­ance companies, mutual funds, and banks were only beginning to use such techniques. He was the conceptualizer and salesman, but once he had the idea for a new kind of service organization, he got

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Culture Beginnings Through Founder/Leader Actions: Ken Olsen/DEC

The culture of DEC has been described in detail in Chapter Three. In this section, I want to focus more specifically on how DEC’s founder, Ken Olsen, created a management system that led eventually to the culture I described in that chapter. Olsen developed his beliefs, attitudes, and values in a strong Protestant family

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Wozniak and Jobs in Apple, Watson in IBM, and Packard and Hewlett in HP

I know less about the details of the founding of these companies, but taking a cultural perspective and analyzing cultures from the point of view of what we do know about the founders produces some immediate insights into the cultures of these companies. This kind of analysis also helps us understand why three companies

How leaders embed organizational culture?

The simplest explanation of how leaders get their message across is that they do it through “charisma”—that mysterious ability to capture the subordinates’ attention and to communicate major assumptions and val­ues in a vivid and clear manner (Bennis and Nanus, 1985; Conger, 1989; Leavitt, 1986). Charisma is an important mechanism of culture creation, but

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Secondary Articulation and Reinforcement Mechanisms of Organizational Culture

In a young organization, design, structure, architecture, rituals, stories, and formal statements are cultural reinforcers, not culture creators. Once an organization has matured and stabilized, these same mechanisms come to be constraints on future leaders. But in a growing organization, these six mechanisms are secondary because they work only if they are consistent with

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Differentiation and the Growth of Subcultures

1. Differentiation and the Growth of Subcultures All organizations undergo a process of differentiation as they age and grow. This is variously called division of labor, functionalization, divisionaliza­tion, or diversification. The common element, however, is that as the num­ber of people, customers, goods, and services increases, it becomes less and less efficient for the

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Organizational Culture Changes: Founding and Early Growth

In the first stage—the founding and early growth of a new organization— the main cultural thrust comes from the founders and their assumptions. The cultural paradigm that becomes embedded, if the organization suc­ceeds in fulfilling its primary task and survives, can then be viewed as that organization’s distinctive competence, the basis for member identity,

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Transition to Midlife: Problems of Succession for Organizational Culture

Organizational midlife can be defined structurally as the stage at which founder owners have relinquished the control of the organization to pro­moted or appointed general managers. They may still be owners and remain on the board, but operational control is in the hands of a second generation of general managers. This stage can occur

Culture Change Through Systematic Promotion from Selected Subcultures

The strength of the midlife organization is in the diversity of its subcultures. Leaders can therefore evolve midlife organizations culturally by assessing the strengths and weaknesses of different subcultures and then biasing the cor­porate culture toward one of those subcultures by systematically promoting people from that subculture into key power positions. This is an

Culture Change Through Technological Seduction

One of the less obvious but more important ways in which the leaders of midlife organizations change cultural assumptions is through the subtle, cumulative, and sometimes unintended consequences of new technology that they introduce deliberately or take advantage of. At one extreme, we can observe the gradual evolutionary diffusion of a technological innova­tion such

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Culture Change Through Infusion of Outsiders

Shared assumptions can be changed by changing the composition of the dom­inant groups or coalitions in an organization—what Kleiner in his research has identified as “the group who really matters” (2003). The most potent version of this change mechanism occurs when a board of directors brings in a new CEO from outside the organization,

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Organizational Maturity and Potential Decline

Continued success creates two organizational phenomena that make cul­ture change more difficult: (1) Many basic assumptions become more strongly held, and (2) organizations develop espoused values and ideals about themselves that are increasingly out of line with the actual assump­tions by which they operate. If the internal and external environments remain stable, strongly held

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Culture Change Through Scandal and Explosion of Myths

Where incongruities exist between espoused values and basic assump­tions, scandal and myth explosion become primary mechanisms of culture change. Nothing will change until the consequences of the actual operat­ing assumptions create a public and visible scandal that cannot be hidden, avoided, or denied. One of the most powerful triggers to change of this sort

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Culture Change Through Turnarounds

After a scandal or crisis has brought basic assumptions into consciousness and been assessed as dysfunctional, the basic choices are between some kind of “turnaround,” a more rapid transformation of parts of the culture to permit the organization to become adaptive once again, or destruction of the organization and its culture through a process

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Culture Change Through Mergers and Acquisitions

When one organization acquires another organization or when two orga­nizations are merged, there is inevitable culture clash because it is unlikely that two organizations will have the same cultures. The leadership role is then to figure out how best to manage this clash. The two cultures can be left alone to continue to evolve

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