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Organizational Culture and Leadership

Third Edition

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Copyright © 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.josseybass.com

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schein, Edgar H. Organizational culture and leadership / Edgar H. Schein.—3rd ed.

p. cm.—(The Jossey-Bass business & management series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7879-6845-5 (alk. paper)

1. Corporate culture. 2. Culture. 3. Leadership. I. Title. II. Series. HD58.7.S33 2004 302.3'5—dc22

2004002764

Printed in the United States of America THIRD EDITION

HB Printing 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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T H E C O N C E P T O F O R G A N I Z AT I O N A L C U LT U R E :

W H Y B O T H E R ?

Culture is an abstraction, yet the forces that are created in social and organizational situations that derive from culture are powerful. If we don’t understand the operation of these forces, we become vic- tim to them. To illustrate how the concept of culture helps to illu- minate organizational situations, I will begin by describing several situations I have encountered in my experience as a consultant.

Four Brief Examples

In the first case, that of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), I was called in to help a management group improve its communica- tion, interpersonal relationships, and decision making. After sitting in on a number of meetings, I observed, among other things, (1) high levels of interrupting, confrontation, and debate; (2) exces- sive emotionality about proposed courses of action; (3) great frus- tration over the difficulty of getting a point of view across; and (4) a sense that every member of the group wanted to win all the time.

Over a period of several months, I made many suggestions about better listening, less interrupting, more orderly processing of the agenda, the potential negative effects of high emotionality and con- flict, and the need to reduce the frustration level. The group mem- bers said that the suggestions were helpful, and they modified certain aspects of their procedure; for example, they scheduled more time for some of their meetings. However, the basic pattern did not change. No matter what kind of intervention I attempted, the basic style of the group remained the same.

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In the second case, that of the Ciba-Geigy Company—a large multinational chemical and pharmaceutical company located in Basel, Switzerland—I was asked, as part of a broader consultation project, to help create a climate for innovation in an organization that felt a need to become more flexible in order to respond to its increasingly dynamic business environment. The organization con- sisted of many different business units, geographical units, and func- tional groups. As I got to know more about these units and their problems, I observed that some very innovative things were going on in many places in the company. I wrote several memos that described these innovations and presented other ideas from my own experience. I gave the memos to my contact person in the company with the request that he distribute them to the various geographic and business unit managers who needed to be made aware of these ideas.

After some months, I discovered that those managers to whom I had personally given the memo thought it was helpful and on tar- get, but rarely, if ever, did they pass it on, and none were ever dis- tributed by my contact person. I also suggested meetings of managers from different units to stimulate lateral communication, but found no support at all for such meetings. No matter what I did, I could not seem to get information flowing, especially laterally across divisional, functional, or geographical boundaries. Yet everyone agreed in prin- ciple that innovation would be stimulated by more lateral commu- nication and encouraged me to keep on “helping.”

In the third example, Amoco, a large oil company that was eventually merged with British Petroleum (BP), decided to cen- tralize all of its engineering functions in a single service unit. Whereas engineers had previously been regular parts of projects, they were now supposed to sell their services to clients who would be charged for these services. The engineers resisted violently and many of them threatened to leave the organization. We were unable to reorganize this engineering organization to fit the new company requirements.

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In the fourth example, Alpha Power, an electric and gas utility that services a large urban area, was faced with having to become more environmentally responsible after the company was brought up on criminal charges for allegedly failing to report the presence of asbestos in a local unit that had suffered an accident. Electrical workers, who took pride in their “heroic” self-image of keeping the lights on no matter what, also held the strong norm that one did not report spills and other environmental and safety problems if such reports would embarrass the group. I was involved in a multi- year project to change this self-image to one in which the “heroic” model would be to report all safety and environmental hazards, even if that meant reporting on peers—or bosses. All employees were supposed to adopt a new concept of personal responsibility, teamwork, and openness of communication. Yet no matter how clear the new mandate was made, safety problems continued wher- ever peer group relations were involved.

I did not really understand the forces operating in any of these cases until I began to examine my own assumptions about how things should work in these organizations and began to test whether my assumptions fitted those operating in my clients’ systems. This step—examining the shared assumptions in the organization or group one is dealing with and comparing them to one’s own—takes one into cultural analysis and will be the focus from here on.

It turned out that at DEC, an assumption was shared by senior managers and most of the other members of the organization: that one cannot determine whether or not something is “true” or “valid” unless one subjects the idea or proposal to intensive debate; and fur- ther, that only ideas that survive such debate are worth acting on, and only ideas that survive such scrutiny will be implemented. The group assumed that what they were doing was discovering truth, and in this context being polite to each other was relatively unim- portant. I became more helpful to the group when I realized this and went to the flip chart and just started to write down the various ideas they were processing. If someone was interrupted, I could ask

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them to restate their point instead of punishing the interrupter. The group began to focus on the items on the chart and found that this really did help their communication and decision process. I had finally understood and entered into an essential element of their cul- ture instead of imposing my own.

At Ciba-Geigy I eventually discovered that there was a strong shared assumption that each manager’s job was his or her private “turf,” not to be infringed on. The strong impression was commu- nicated that one’s job is like one’s home, and if someone gives one unsolicited information, it is like walking into one’s home unin- vited. Sending memos to people implies that they do not already know what is in the memo, and that is potentially insulting. In this organization managers prided themselves on knowing whatever they needed to know to do their job. Had I understood this, I would have asked for a list of the names of the managers and sent the memo directly to them. They would have accepted it from me because I was the paid consultant and expert.

At Amoco I began to understand the resistance of the engineers when I learned that in their occupational culture there are strong assumptions that “good work should speak for itself” and “engineers should not have to go out and sell themselves.” They were used to having people come to them for services and did not have a good role model for how to sell themselves.

At Alpha Power I learned that all work units had strong norms and values of self-protection that often overrode the new require- ments imposed on the company by the courts. The groups had their own experience base for what was safe and what was not, which they were willing to trust, whereas the tasks of reporting environ- mental spills and cleaning them up involved new skills that work- ers were eventually willing to learn and collaborate on.

In each of these cases I initially did not understand what was going on because my own basic assumptions about truth and turf and group relations differed from the shared assumptions of the members of the organization. And my assumptions reflected my occupation as a social psychologist and organization consultant,

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while the group’s assumptions reflected in part their occupations as electrical engineers, chemists, and electrical workers.

To make sense of such situations requires taking a cultural per- spective; learning to see the world through cultural lenses; becom- ing competent in cultural analysis—by which I mean being able to perceive and decipher the cultural forces that operate in groups, organizations, and occupations. Once we learn to see the world through cultural lenses, all kinds of things begin to make sense that initially were mysterious, frustrating, or seemingly stupid.

Culture: An Empirically Based Abstraction

Culture as a concept has had a long and checkered history. It has been used by the layman as a word to indicate sophistication, as when we say that someone is very “cultured.” It has been used by anthropologists to refer to the customs and rituals that societies develop over the course of their history. In the last several decades it has been used by some organizational researchers and managers to refer to the climate and practices that organizations develop around their handling of people, or to the espoused values and credo of an organization.

In this context, managers speak of developing the “right kind of culture,” a “culture of quality” or a “culture of customer service,” suggesting that culture has to do with certain values that managers are trying to inculcate in their organizations. Also implied in this usage is the assumption that there are better or worse cultures and stronger or weaker cultures, and that the “right” kind of culture will influence how effective the organization is. In the managerial liter- ature there is often the implication that having a culture is neces- sary for effective performance, and that the stronger the culture, the more effective the organization.

Researchers have supported some of these views by reporting findings that cultural “strength” or certain kinds of cultures cor- relate with economic performance (Denison, 1990; Kotter and Heskett, 1992; Sorensen, 2002). Consultants have touted “culture

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surveys” and have claimed that they can improve organizational performance by helping organizations create certain kinds of cul- tures, but these claims are based on very different definitions of cul- ture than what I will be arguing for here. As we will see, many of these usages of the word culture display not only a superficial and incorrect view of culture, but also a dangerous tendency to evalu- ate particular cultures in an absolute way and to suggest that there actually are “right” cultures for organizations. As we will also see, whether or not a culture is “good” or “bad,” “functionally effective” or not, depends not on the culture alone, but on the relationship of the culture to the environment in which it exists.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of culture as a concept is that it points us to phenomena that are below the surface, that are powerful in their impact but invisible and to a considerable degree unconscious. In that sense, culture is to a group what personality or character is to an individual. We can see the behavior that results, but often we cannot see the forces underneath that cause certain kinds of behavior. Yet, just as our personality and character guide and constrain our behavior, so does culture guide and constrain the behavior of members of a group through the shared norms that are held in that group.

To complicate matters further, one can view personality and character as the accumulation of cultural learning that an individ- ual has experienced in the family, the peer group, the school, the community, and the occupation. In this sense, culture is within us as individuals and yet constantly evolving as we join and create new groups that eventually create new cultures. Culture as a concept is thus an abstraction but its behavioral and attitudinal consequences are very concrete indeed.

If an abstract concept is to be useful to our thinking, it should be observable and also increase our understanding of a set of events that are otherwise mysterious or not well understood. From this point of view, I will argue that we must avoid the superficial models of culture and build on the deeper, more complex anthropological models. Culture as a concept will be most useful if it helps us to bet-

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ter understand the hidden and complex aspects of life in groups, organizations, and occupations, and we cannot obtain this under- standing if we use superficial definitions.

What Needs to Be Explained?

Most of us, in our roles as students, employees, managers, research- ers, or consultants, work in and have to deal with groups and orga- nizations of all kinds. Yet we continue to find it amazingly difficult to understand and justify much of what we observe and experience in our organizational life. Too much seems to be bureaucratic or political or just plain irrational—as in the four cases that I described at the beginning of this chapter.

People in positions of authority, especially our immediate bosses, often frustrate us or act incomprehensibly; those we consider the leaders of our organizations often disappoint us. When we get into arguments or negotiations with others, we often cannot under- stand how our opponents could take such ridiculous positions. When we observe other organizations, we often find it incompre- hensible that smart people could do such dumb things. We recog- nize cultural differences at the ethnic or national level, but find them puzzling at the group, organizational, or occupational level.

As managers, when we try to change the behavior of subordi- nates, we often encounter resistance to change to an extent that seems beyond reason. We observe departments in our organization that seem to be more interested in fighting with each other than get- ting the job done. We see communication problems and misunder- standings between group members that should not be occurring between reasonable people. We explain in detail why something dif- ferent must be done, yet people continue to act as if they had not heard us.

As leaders who are trying to get our organizations to become more effective in the face of severe environmental pressures, we are sometimes amazed at the degree to which individuals and groups in the organization will continue to behave in obviously ineffective

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ways, often threatening the very survival of the organization. As we try to get things done that involve other groups, we often discover that they do not communicate with each other and that the level of conflict between groups in organizations and in the community is often astonishingly high.

As teachers, we encounter the sometimes mysterious phenom- enon that different classes behave completely differently from each other, even though our material and teaching style remains the same. As employees considering a new job, we realize that compa- nies differ greatly in their approach, even in the same industry and geographic locale. We feel these differences even as we walk through the doors of different organizations, such as restaurants, banks, stores, or airlines.

As members of different occupations, we are aware that being a doctor, lawyer, engineer, accountant, or other professional involves not only the learning of technical skills but also the adoption of cer- tain values and norms that define our occupation. If we violate some of these norms we can be thrown out of the occupation. But where do these come from and how do we reconcile the fact that each occupation considers its norms and values to be the correct ones?

The concept of culture helps to explain all of these phenomena and to normalize them. If we understand the dynamics of culture, we will be less likely to be puzzled, irritated, and anxious when we encounter the unfamiliar and seemingly irrational behavior of peo- ple in organizations, and we will have a deeper understanding not only of why various groups of people or organizations can be so dif- ferent, but also why it is so hard to change them. Even more impor- tant, if we understand culture better we will better understand ourselves—better understand the forces acting within us that define who we are, that reflect the groups with which we identify and to which we want to belong.

Culture and Leadership

When we examine culture and leadership closely, we see that they are two sides of the same coin; neither can really be understood by

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itself. On the one hand, cultural norms define how a given nation or organizations will define leadership—who will get promoted, who will get the attention of followers. On the other hand, it can be argued that the only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture; that the unique talent of leaders is their ability to understand and work with culture; and that it is an ultimate act of leadership to destroy culture when it is viewed as dysfunctional.

If one wishes to distinguish leadership from management or administration, one can argue that leadership creates and changes cultures, while management and administration act within a cul- ture. By defining leadership in this manner, I am not implying that culture is easy to create or change, or that formal leaders are the only determiners of culture. On the contrary, as we will see, culture refers to those elements of a group or organization that are most sta- ble and least malleable.

Culture is the result of a complex group learning process that is only partially influenced by leader behavior. But if the group’s sur- vival is threatened because elements of its culture have become maladapted, it is ultimately the function of leadership at all levels of the organization to recognize and do something about this situa- tion. It is in this sense that leadership and culture are conceptually intertwined.

Toward a Formal Definition of Culture

When we apply the concept of culture to groups, organizations, and occupations, we are almost certain to have conceptual and seman- tic confusion, because such social units are themselves difficult to define unambiguously. I will use as the critical defining characteris- tic of a group the fact that its members have a shared history. Any social unit that has some kind of shared history will have evolved a culture, with the strength of that culture dependent on the length of its existence, the stability of the group’s membership, and the emotional intensity of the actual historical experiences they have shared. We all have a commonsense notion of this phenomenon,

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yet it is difficult to define it abstractly. In talking about organiza- tional culture with colleagues and members of organizations, I often find that we agree that “it” exists and that it is important in its effects, but when we try to define it, we have completely different ideas of what “it” is.

To make matters worse, the concept of culture has been the subject of considerable academic debate in the last twenty-five years and there are various approaches to defining and studying culture (for example, those of Hofstede, 1991; Trice and Beyer, 1993; Schultz, 1995; Deal and Kennedy, 1999; Cameron and Quinn, 1999; Ashkanasy, Wilderom, and Peterson, 2000; and Mar- tin, 2002). This debate is a healthy sign in that it testifies to the importance of culture as a concept, but at the same time it creates difficulties for both the scholar and the practitioner if definitions are fuzzy and usages are inconsistent. For the purpose of this intro- ductory chapter, I will give only a quick overview of this range of usage and then offer a precise and formal definition that makes the most sense from my point of view. Other usages and points of view will be further reviewed in later chapters.

Commonly used words relating to culture emphasize one of its critical aspects—the idea that certain things in groups are shared or held in common. The major categories of observables that are asso- ciated with culture in this sense are shown in Exhibit 1.1.

All of these concepts relate to culture or reflect culture in that they deal with things that group members share or hold in common, but none of them can usefully be thought of as “the culture” of an organization or group. If one asks why we need the word culture at

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Exhibit 1.1. Various Categories Used to Describe Culture.

Observed behavioral regularities when people interact: the language they use, the customs and traditions that evolve, and the rituals they employ in a wide variety of situations (Goffman, 1959, 1967; Jones, Moore, and Snyder, 1988; Trice and Beyer, 1993, 1985; Van Maanen, 1979b).

Group norms: the implicit standards and values that evolve in working groups, such as the particular norm of “a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay” that

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Exhibit 1.1. Various Categories Used to Describe Culture, Cont’d.

evolved among workers in the Bank Wiring Room in the Hawthorne studies (Homans, 1950; Kilmann and Saxton, 1983).

Espoused values: the articulated, publicly announced principles and values that the group claims to be trying to achieve, such as “product quality” or “price leadership” (Deal and Kennedy, 1982, 1999).

Formal philosophy: the broad policies and ideological principles that guide a group’s actions toward stockholders, employees, customers, and other stake- holders, such as the highly publicized “HP Way” of Hewlett-Packard (Ouchi, 1981; Pascale and Athos,1981; Packard, 1995).

Rules of the game: the implicit, unwritten rules for getting along in the orga- nization; “the ropes” that a newcomer must learn in order to become an accepted member; “the way we do things around here” (Schein, 1968, 1978; Van Maanen, 1979a, 1979b; Ritti and Funkhouser, 1987).

Climate: the feeling that is conveyed in a group by the physical layout and the way in which members of the organization interact with each other, with customers, or other outsiders (Ashkanasy, Wilderom, and Peterson, 2000; Schneider, 1990; Tagiuri and Litwin, 1968).

Embedded skills: the special competencies displayed by group members in accomplishing certain tasks, the ability to make certain things that gets passed on from generation to generation without necessarily being articulated in writ- ing (Argyris and Schön, 1978; Cook and Yanow, 1993; Henderson and Clark, 1990; Peters and Waterman, 1982).

Habits of thinking, mental models, and linguistic paradigms: the shared cogni- tive frames that guide the perceptions, thought, and language used by the mem- bers of a group and taught to new members in the early socialization process (Douglas, 1986; Hofstede, 2001; Van Maanen, 1979b; Senge and others, 1994).

Shared meanings: the emergent understandings created by group members as they interact with each other (as in Geertz, 1973; Smircich, 1983; Van Maanen and Barley, 1984; Weick, 1995).

“Root metaphors” or integrating symbols: the ways in which groups evolve to characterize themselves, which may or may not be appreciated consciously but become embodied in buildings, office layout, and other material artifacts of the group. This level of the culture reflects the emotional and aesthetic response of members as contrasted with the cognitive or evaluative response (as in Gagliardi, 1990; Hatch, 1990; Pondy, Frost, Morgan, and Dandridge, 1983; Schultz, 1995).

Formal rituals and celebrations: the ways in which a group celebrates key events that reflect important values or important “passages” by members, such as promotion, completion of important projects, and milestones (as in Deal and Kennedy, 1982, 1999; Trice and Beyer, 1993).

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all when we have so many other concepts—such as norms, values, behavior patterns, rituals, traditions, and so on—one recognizes that the word culture adds several other critical elements to the con- cept of sharing: structural stability, depth, breadth, and patterning or integration.

Structural Stability

Culture implies some level of structural stability in the group. When we say that something is “cultural,” we imply that it is not only shared, but also stable, because it defines the group. Once we achieve a sense of group identity, it is our major stabilizing force and will not be given up easily. Culture survives even when some members of the organization depart. Culture is hard to change because group members value stability in that it provides meaning and predictability.

Depth

Culture is the deepest, often unconscious part of a group and is, therefore, less tangible and less visible than other parts. From this point of view, most of the concepts reviewed above can be thought of as manifestations of culture, but they are not the essence of what we mean by culture. Note that when something is more deeply embedded it also gains stability.

Breadth

A third characteristic of culture is that once it has developed, it covers all of a group’s functioning. Culture is pervasive; it influences all aspects of how an organization deals with its primary task, its var- ious environments, and its internal operations. Not all groups have cultures in this sense, but the concept connotes that when we refer to the culture of a group we are referring to all of its operations.

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