Three Cultures of Management: The Key to Organizational Learning

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Tags: Leadership

Abstract

Notes

Annotations

(7/23/2022, 10:45:45 PM)

“Every organization develops an internal culture based on its operational success, what I call the "operator culture." But every organization also has, in its various functions, the designers and technocrats who drive the core technologies. I call this the "engineering culture"; their fundamental reference group is their worldwide occupational community. Every organization also has its executive management, the CEO and his or her immediate subordinates — what I call the "executive culture." CEOs, because of the nature of their jobs and the structure of the capital markets, also constitute a worldwide occupational community in the sense that they have common problems that are unique to their roles.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 9)

“A culture is a set of basic tacit assumptions about how the world is and ought to be that a group of people share and that determines their perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and, to some degree, their overt behavior." Culture manifests itself at three levels:

  1. the level of deep tacit assumptions that are the essence of the culture,
  2. the level of espoused values that often reflect what a group wishes ideally to be and the way it wants to present itself publicly, and
  3. the day-to-day behavior that represents a complex compromise among the espoused values, the deeper assumptions, and the immediate requirements of the situation.

Overt behavior alone cannot be used to decipher culture because situational contingencies often make us behave in a manner that is inconsistent with our deeper values and assumptions. For this reason, one often sees "inconsistencies" or "conflicts" in overt behavior or between behavior and espoused values. To discover the basic elements of a culture, one must either observe behavior for a very long time or get directly at the underlying values and assumptions that drive the perceptions and thoughts of the group members.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 11)

“Cultures arise within organizations based on their own histories and experiences. Starting with the founders, diose members of an organization who have shared in its successful growth have developed assumptions about the world and how to succeed in it, and have taught those assumptions to new members of the organization.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 12)

“Shared assumptions also typically form around the functional units of the organization. They are often based on members' similar educational backgrounds or similar organizational experiences, what we often end up calling "stove pipes" or "silos." We all know that getting cross-functional project teams to work well together is difficult because the members bring their functional cultures into the project and, as a consequence, have difficulty communicating with each other, reaching consensus, and implementing decisions effectively. The difficulty of communication across these boundaries arises not only from the fact that the functional groups have different goals, but also from the more fundamental issue that the very meaning of the words they use will differ.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 12)

“When they try to work together, they will often attribute disagreement to personalities and fail to notice the deeper, shared assumptions that color how each function thinks.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 12)

“Another kind of subculture, less often acknowledged, reflects the common experiences of given levels within a hierarchy. Culture arises through shared experiences of success.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 12)

“The culture of operators is the most difficult to describe because it evolves locally in organizations and within operational units (see the sidebar). Thus we can identify an operator culture in the nuclear plant, the chemical complex, the auto manufacturing plant, the airplane cockpit, and the office, but it is not clear what elements make this culture broader than the local unit. To focus on this issue, we must consider that the operations in different industries reflect the broad technological trends in those industries. At some fundamental level, how one does things ih a given industry reflects the core technologies that created that industry. And, as those core technologies themselves evolve, the nature of operations changes.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 13)

Assumptions of the Operator Culture

“The operator culture is based on human interaction, and most line units learn that high levels of communication, trust, and teamwork are essential to getting the work done efficiently. Operators also learn that no matter how clearly the rules are specified as to what is supposed to be done under different operational conditions, the world is to some degree unpredictable and one must be prepared to use one's own innovative skills. If the operations are complex, as in a nuclear plant, operators learn that they are highly interdependent and must work together as a team, especially when dealing with unanticipated events. Rules and hierarchy often get in the way in unpredicted conditions. Operators become highly sensitive to the degree to which the production process is a system of interdependent functions, all of which must work together to be efficient and effective. These points apply to all kinds of "production processes,"” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 13)

“In all organizations, one group represents the basic design elements of the technology underlying the work of the organization and has the knowledge of how that technology is to be utilized. This occupational community cuts across nations and industries and can best be labeled the "engineering culture."'” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 14)

“Engineers and technocrats of all persuasions are attracted to engineering because it is abstract and impersonal. Their education reinforces the view that problems have abstract solutions and that those solutions can, in principle, be implemented in the real world with products and systems free of human foibles and errors.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 14)

“In the design of complex systems such as jet aircraft or nuclear plants, the engineer prefers a technical routine to ensure safety rather tban relying on a human team to manage the possible contingencies. Engineers recognize the human factor and design for it, but their preference is to make things as automatic as possible.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 14)

Assumptions of the Engineering Culture

“a key theme in the culture of engineering is the preoccupation with designing humans out of the systems rather than into them” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 14)

“The "executive culture" is the set of tacit assumptions that CEOs and their immediate subordinates share worldwide. This executive worldview is built around the necessity to maintain an organizations financial health and is preoccupied witb boards, investors, and tbe capital markets” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 15)

“As managers rise in the hierarchy, as tbeir level of responsibility and accountability grows, they not only bave to become more preoccupied with financial matters, but also find tbat it becomes harder to observe and influence tbe basic work of tbe organization. They discover tbat they have to manage from afar, and tbat discovery inevitably forces them to think in terms of control systems and routines tbat become increasingly impersonal. Because accountability is always centralized and flows to tbe top of organizations, executives feel an increasing need to know wbat is going on, while recognizing tbat it is harder to get reliable information. That need for information and control drives tbem to develop elaborate information systems alongside tbe control systems and to feel increasingly alone in tbeir position atop tbe hierarchy.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 15)

Assumptions of the Executive Culture Financial Focus

Self-image: The Embattled Lone Hero

Hierarchical and Individual Focus

Task and Control Focus

“The executive culture, thus, has in common with the engineering culture a predilection to see people as impersonal resources that generate problems rather than solutions. In other words, both the executive culture and the engineering culture view people and relationships as means to the end of efficiency and productivity, not as ends in themselves. If we must have human operators, so be it, but let's minimize their possible impact on the operations and their cost to the enterprise.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 16)

“In many industries, there is enough initial alignment among the needs of the task as defined by the operators, the needs of the engineers for reliable and efftcient operations, and the needs of the executives for minimizing costs and maximizing profits so that there are no problems. But when organizations attempt to learn in a generative way, when they attempt to reinvent themselves because the technologies and environmental conditions have changed drastically, these three cultures collide, and we see frustration, low productivity, and the failure of innovations to survive and diffuse.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 16)

“The lack of alignment among the executive, engineering, and operator cultures can be seen in other industries such as health care in which the needs of the primary care physicians (the operators) to do health maintenance and illness prevention conflicts with the engineering desire to save life at all costs and the executive desire to minimize costs no matter how this might constrain either the engineers or the operators.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 17)

“the executive and engineering cultures are worldwide occupational communities that have developed a common worldview based on their education, their shared common technology, and their work experience. This means that even if an executive or engineer in a given organization learns to think like an operator and becomes more aligned with the operator culture, his or her eventual replacement will most probably return the organization to where it was” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 17)

“each of the three cultures is "valid" from its viewpoint, in the sense of doing what it is supposed to. Executives are supposed to worry about the financial health of their organization, and engineers are supposed to innovate toward the most creative peoplefree solutions. To create alignment among the three cultures, then, is not a case of deciding which one has the right viewpoint, but of creating enough mutual understanding among them to evolve solutions that will be understood and implemented.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 17)

“both the executive and engineering cultures are primarily task focused and operate on the implicit assumption that people are the problem, either as costs or as sources of error. In the case of the engineers, the assumption is already implicit in their education and training. The ultimately elegant solution is one that always works and works automatically, in other words, without human intervention. In the case of the executives, the situation is more complex. Either executives have come from the engineering culture where people were not important in the first place, or they learned as they were promoted and began to feel responsible for hundreds of people that they had to think in terms of systems, routines, rules, and abstract processes for organizing, motivating, and controlling. And as they became chief executives accountable to the financial markets and their stockholders, they learned to focus more and more on the financial aspects of the organization. The gradual depersonalization of the organization and the perception that employees are mostly a cost instead of a capital investment is thus a learned occupational response.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 18)

“Executives recognize that their world is one of imperfect information, of constant change, and of short-run coping while attempting to maintain a strategic focus. Engineers seek elegant permanent solutions that are guaranteed to work and be safe under all circtimstances and, therefore, typically produce solutions that cost much more than the executives believe they can afford. So the executives and the engineers constantly battle about how good is good enough and how to keep costs down enough to remain competitive.” Go to annotation (Schein, 1996, p. 18)

References to check out