Advanced Organisation Theory

1. Advanced Organisation Theory Welcome to my last week of the course of 2009!

2. Organizational Culture Theory. • Organizational culture is the culture that exists in an organization. • Culture is to the organization what personality is to the individual – a hidden, yet unifying theme that provides meaning, direction and mobilization. (Kilman and others, 1985)

3. Organizational Culture • “The culture of a group can be defined as A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.” (Schein, p 364-365)

4. The culture perspective challenge thestructural and systems perspectives! For example: – It helps us to better understand/understand in a new way how organizations make decisions and how and why organizations, and people in organizations, act as they do.

5. Different organizational cultures. • What has worked repeatedly for one organization may not for another. • Organizational culture is shaped by many factors. • Some organizational cultures are more distinctive than others. • In some organizations there are many subcultures.

6. How to study organizationalculture? • The organizational culture school has turned to qualitative research methods such as ethnography and participant observation.

7. The birth and development oforganizational culture studies. • 1950 – The first literature about organizational culture are published. • 1960 - 1970 – Organizational and professional socialization processes received attention. • 1980 – 2006 - The turning point for the organizational culture literature where in the beginning of 1980s – and has been important since then.

8. Article 35, by E. Schein, Defining Organizational Culture, (1993). • Right kind of culture. • A culture of quality. • There are better and worse cultures. • There are stronger and weaker cultures. • He states that we have to avoid these superficial models of culture.

9. Culture as a useful concept. • If it helps us to better understand the hidden and complex aspects of organizational life. • Culture is the result of a complex group learning process that is only partially influenced by leaders behavior. • The accumulated shared learning of a given group, based on a history of shared experience.

10. Language, customs and traditions. Group norms. Espoused values. Formal philosophy. Rules of the game. Climate. Embedded skills. Habits of thinking, mental models, and/or linguistic paradigms. Shared meanings. ”Root metaphors” or integrating symbols. Commonly used words relating to culture.

11. Article 36 by S.Cook & D. Yanow, Culture and Organizational Learning. • In writing on organizational learning most authors… have examined how individuals learn in organizational contexts or have explored that theories of individual learning can be applied to organizations or both.

12. How organizations learn. • Organizations can learn because they possess capacities that are identical or equivalent to the capacities that individuals possess that enable them to learn.

13. What is the nature of learning as done by organizations? • A cultural perspective on organizational learning focus on organizations as empirical phenomenon… • “..as the acquiring, sustaining, or changing of intersubjective meanings through the artifactual vehicles of their expression and transmission and the collective actions of the group.” (p376)

14. Reflection on cultural learning. • The cultural perspective makes it possible to explore the meaning of organizational learning by beginning with empirical observations of group action rather than relying on conceptual arguments about likeness between theories of individual cognition and theories of organizations. • It allows us to view organizational learning as both an innovative and a preservative activity.

15. Article 37 by H. Trice and J. Beyer: Changing Organizational Cultures. “We will reserve the term cultural change to refer to planned, more encompassing, and more substantial kinds of changes than those which arise spontaneously within cultures or as a part of conscious effort to keep an existing culture vital.”(p383)

16. Types of cultural change. • -revolutionary and comprehensive efforts to change the cultures of entire organizations. • -efforts confined largely to changing specific subcultures or subunits within organizations. • -efforts that are gradual and incremental, but nevertheless cumulate in a comprehensive reshaping of an entire organizations culture.

17. The amount of planned culturalchange. • The pervasiveness • The magnitude • The innovativeness • Duration

18. End Thank you for today, see you all tomorrow!