Leadership Knowledge

For every manager who wants to improve his organization it’s a mast
Rating: 4 / 5

I have to confess up front I’m a skeptic about “culture management.” It was a fad many companies wasted a lot of time and money on. When I was a graduate student in organizational sociology, I loved studying organizational culture but never found much in the “applied” culture literature that persuaded me that business firms ought to be nearly as transfixed by the allure of tweaking their culture as they have been. There’s been a lot of hacks making money selling crackpot ideas to companies on the premise that strong culture=high profits. Consultants have to make a living too I guess. I just wish it wasn’t giving organizational culture theory such a bad name. Anyhow, Schein is an exception to the rule. Certainly nobody could bad-mouth his academic credentials–having studied at University of Chicago, Stanford and Harvard–he’s pretty much about as solid an organizational consultant as you’re going to find.

Schein is also a pretty hardcore functionalist and looks at organizational culture principally as a monolithic unified whole. “The Founder” is the all important character in setting the basis of any company culture. A strong founder gives the company a unique set of values that it carries throughout its existence. “Culture” for Schein is a shared set of values and practices. It is an acquisition–and not something all companies have. In his view, it’s a good thing and a desirable trait, as it unifies the organization and gives it a direction. That is the functionalist aspect of his theory–essentially org culture functions to hold together and unify the organization and keep it strong. For Schein, the idea of sub-cultures or counter-cultures operating within the same organization makes no sense. An org that has divergent values and practices from department to department is an org that is divided and has a weakened founder culture or.. (horrors) no culture at all. Unlike some theorists in the functionalist camp, Schein is not as assertive in claiming that a strong culture makes a successful company. Still, I think it is fair to say that from his perspective failing companies may well be able to blame the lack of a cohesive culture for some of their problems.

This book has been around for a while now and indeed it is considered a classic of the functionalist approach to culture management and consequently carries with it all the connotations that the “functionalist” label carries. Functionalism has gotten a bad name in sociology over the years and is not held in particularly high esteem in academic circles. Critics call it an inherently conservative theory, focused only on what holds groups together, while at the same time entirely unable to account for things like conflict and other forces that pull groups apart. Some say functionalism is inherently tautological. Personally, I have mixed feelings. I happen to like Emile Durkheim–the father of functionalism–and think we ought to cut him some slack for excessively functionalizing the world because he gave us the field of sociology as a gift. But sociology carries a lot of scars from those days and has tried hard to put functionalism behind it. In more recent years, somehow functionalism spread into psychology (like a disease some would argue). Anyway, Schein’s theory tends to appeal rather less to the academic world and more to the business world. It gives CEO’s the impression that if they can just get some “culture” going in their company they’ll be more successful. To many academics, Schein’s theory now looks too simplistic and reductive. Decades of data doesn’t tend to support the idea that a strong founder culture makes a company more successful. Moreover, huge successful corporations often have whole divisions that seem to have their own values and practices that may not be shared by other parts of the company. The current view among many academics is to say that “organizations do not ACQUIRE a culture, rather they ARE a culture.” Stanford’s Joanne Martin is the best known example of this view.

Assuming you think Schein’s view on org culture is a correct view, the part of the book that would likely appeal most to executives is Schein’s “clinical approach,” a methodology to diagnose culture problems. As far as diagnostic approaches go, it is a controversial subject, but I think it’s fair to say his is one of the better approaches out there. It’s very systematic and tries hard to go deep into understanding more than just a few superficial aspects of organizational culture. Thankfully, Schein doesn’t advocate any type of culture survey, since such surveys as a rule mean next to nothing. Still, does this clinical approach really work? Well,.. I don’t know. I mean, do any of these approaches really work? In general, the evidence doesn’t tend to support the idea that culture management accomplishes what it has tried to accomplish. Schein certainly has a better methodology than most of his counterparts that I’ve read. Still it’s pretty hard to operationalize some of his ideas into an actual plan of action.

In any event, if you’re a grad student or a researcher studying organizational culture, you will certainly want to read this book. It is widely referenced in the org culture literature and Schein represents a high water mark for functionalist org behaviorists. If, on the other hand, you’re trying to fix a screwed up company that you think has culture problems, you could certainly do worse than to read this book. You might get a useful nugget or two out of it, although I think most executives would find it quite frustrating to try to implement the clinical diagnostic approach simply by using this book as a guideline. If a true application of Scheinian culture management is what you’re after, I suspect you’re going to have to call the maestro himself and have him send in his team of consultants.

Rating: 4 / 5