SPRINGER BRIEFS IN PSYCHOLOGY

CULTURE, ORGANIZATIONS, AND WORK

Catherine T. Kwantes
Sharon Glazer

Culture,
Organizations,
and Work
Clarifying Concepts
Chapter 1
Introduction

As businesses become more global and the world becomes “flatter” (Friedman
2005), people in the workplace are increasingly adjusting to and navigating through
its cultural complexity. Although international trading has taken place for millennia,
for much of that time trade interactions tended to be between individuals and small
groups from one culture meeting people from another culture to conduct business.
Examples of those interactions were found on the Silk Road trade route, which
connected East Asia with West Asia from around 206 BCE to 220 CE. Later in
history, the purportedly first multinational corporation, the Dutch East India
Company, recorded sending over one million sailors, half of whom were not Dutch,
to work in Asia between 1600 and 1800, with almost 40% not returning alive
(Emmer and Klooster 1999).
Unlike centuries ago when only a few business contributors would travel and
interact with people from different national cultures, in today’s business environment
it is not at all unusual for entire populations of company employees to work phys-
ically and/or virtually across cultures when interacting between organizations, or
even within the same organization. While it used to be a special endeavor to travel
internationally, today international assignments are becoming a much more common
part of many career trajectories. Travel for meetings, global teams, and global virtual
meetings are also occurring with increasing frequency. For these reasons, under-
standing cultures’ effects at work and developing cross-cultural competence in the
business world is becoming of increasing importance. While this importance is
recognized, the statement itself begs the question of what exactly is “cross-cultural
competence?” Implicit in that question, of course, are the questions: What exactly is
culture? And, how are organizations and the experience of work affected by culture?
The approach to addressing these questions in research and practice depends
upon the point of view adopted. Each point of view, cultural, cross-cultural, or
international, brings a different perspective to understanding and addressing societal
influences on business practices, management, and employee attitudes and behav-
iors. Each brings a different ontological perspective regarding culture and to

© The Author(s) 2017 1

C.T. Kwantes and S. Glazer, Culture, Organizations, and Work,
Culture, Organizations, and Work, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47662-9_1
2 1 Introduction

determining what may or may not be a concern, how best to understand a given
issue, and finally, how to develop an approach to that particular issue.
The particular point of view researchers choose to adopt and the methodological
approach researchers then employ to address culture-related research questions are
important factors to consider from both an epistemological and a practical per-
spective. How people view the origins of culture and the theoretical orientations
they draw on shapes what they believe to know, as that knowledge stems from the
questions asked, how those questions were asked, and the methods used to look for
answers to those questions. Similarly, from a practical perspective, how problems
are addressed will reflect how a given problem is defined and where remedies for
those problems are sought. These assertions are themselves embodiments of an
epistemological assumption that culture is within us, outside of us, and influencing
our interactions with others and entire lifecourse.
Throughout issues of this series scholars will be delving deeper into topics that
address culture, organization, and work at various levels of and units of analysis.
This inaugural issue explicitly utilizes the lens of Industrial and Organizational
(I/O) Psychology, with an implicit assumption that an organization’s resulting
product or service is only as good as the people it employs. For this reason, the
focus is on people’s attitudes, behaviors, and cognitions in the workplace and not
on an organization’s overall performance.
The goals of this first monograph are to identify the myriad ways of studying
culture from the perspective of I/O Psychology, as well as related disciplines,
including ways of operationalizing culture, different levels of culture, culture’s
interplay with the organization and with work. The intent is not to limit the conceptual
approaches for studying culture, organization, and work; rather, it is to present
numerous different ways of viewing the concepts, with the full awareness that these
are not the only ways. Each issue throughout this series is intended to help ideate ways
to enhance and improve empirical work, as well as to create, develop, and employ new
approaches in the realm of applied activities dealing with culture, organization, and
work. The aggregate of the authors’ works in this series will support the ultimate goal
of enhancing individuals’ cross-cultural competence in research and/or in practice.
The penultimate goal for this series of brief books, then, is to bring to light some
of the critical questions related to culture and its effect in the workplace. Bringing a
different focus in each volume on culture, organization, and/or work, the hope is to
distinguish pathways for the myriad reflections of culture in research on work,
personnel, and organizational psychology and behavior, and elucidate contributions
each path makes vís a vís the others.
Culture, organization, and work are envisioned as interacting concepts (see
Fig. 1.1). Culture influences, is influenced by, and interacts with the organization
and/or work performed. It is a macro concept, even though its impact is measured at
the level of individual performance. It is more complex than any one definition or
measurement can encompass, and for that reason flexible enough to assess in a way
that lends itself to individual research interests related to culture.
1 Introduction 3

Fig. 1.1 A model of the

independent and interactive
linkages between culture,
organization, and work
Culture

Organization
Work

The organization represents a meso-level construct and the immediate context in

which a person engages at work. An organization, as a structured entity, does so in
a specific context within the larger social-contextual milieu (societal culture). The
term organization is not meant to put parameters around an organized unit, but
rather we invite authors and readers to conceptualize organizations as institutions
that reinforce particular values, beliefs, practices, norms, assumptions, and rituals in
an effort to promote and give meaning to its (organizational) existence. Thinking of
an organization in this way necessitates the study of its culture as it evidences itself
in the use of physical spaces, division of labor and managerial roles, types of social
groups, and power and hierarchy structures (Porras and Robertson 1992).
Finally, the concept “work” refers to the immediate experience of an individual
who engages in work, as well as the activities that make up the behavior of work.
“Work” may be thought of as a micro-level concept, as it is studied at the level of
the individual. For the purposes of this series, work is viewed as a set of activities
that must be performed within a context that is influenced by societal culture,
organizational culture, and professional/occupational culture, and how well one
performs those activities is further influenced by individual differences, including
temperament, knowledge, skills, abilities, motivations, and other personal charac-
teristics. Work, as conceptualized here, encompasses the meaning people impose on
jobs and job titles, and the kinds of identities people form as a result of job titles,
professional/occupational cultures, organizational cultures, and societal cultures.
Societal and organizational cultures influence work, and work can in some
circumstances influence those cultures in turn (Kwantes and Dickson 2011). The
sizes of the three rings in Fig. 1.1 differ to illustrate unit-level differences, not the
difference in importance or magnitude of influence. In fact, in order of saliency,
predictors of employee behavior are most probably the work itself, then the orga-
nization, and finally the societal culture. However, it is important to emphasize that
all three also interact to influence behavior. Note, too, that there are aspects of
organization and aspects of work that influence each other without the influence
of culture, as well as aspects of each that independently fall outside the reach of
4 1 Introduction

culture. This reflects the position that while culture is important, its influence may
not always be discernable or detected through survey measurement or even
ethnographic evaluations.

References

Emmer, P. C., & Klooster, W. (1999). The Dutch Atlantic, 1600-1800 expansion without empire.
Itinerario, 23, 48–69. doi:10.1017/S0165115300024761.
Friedman, T. L. (2005). The world is flat: A brief history of the twenty-first century. New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Kwantes, C. T., & Dickson, M. W. (2011). Organizational culture in a societal context: Lessons
from GLOBE and beyond. In N. N. Ashkanasy, C. Wilderom, & M. F. Peterson (Eds.), The
handbook of organizational culture and climate (2nd ed., pp. 494–514). Newbury Park, CA:
Sage.
Porras, J. I., & Robertson, P. J. (1992). Organizational development: Theory, practice, and
research. In M. D. Dunnette & L. M. Hough (Eds.), Handbook of industrial and organizational
psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 3, pp. 719–822). Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
Chapter 4
Organizations and Culture

An organization, for the purpose of this series, is defined as any social system or
entity that produces or creates goods or services. Organizations represent the result
of coordinated plans for activities that are undertaken by contributors to the entity
who take on specific labor roles and functions (in a structured pattern, e.g., orga-
nizational status or responsibility) in order to fulfill a common goal (Schein 1980).
As one of the defining features of organizations is the social system, it is clear that
organizations also have cultures.
Organizational cultures, similar to societal cultures, have been defined in a wide
variety of ways, but fundamentally organizational culture still refers to the shared
values, beliefs, and behaviors by members of a given organization. Morgan (1986)
points out that organizational culture comes about from an iterative process of
employees following rules, and then making sense of ensuing behaviors. “In one
sense, then, we can say that the nature of a culture is found in its social norms and
customs, and that if one adheres to these rules of behavior one will be successful in
constructing an appropriate social reality” (Morgan 1986, p. 129). He further notes
that “organizational structure, rules, policies, goals, missions, job descriptions, and
standardized operating procedures …act as primary points of reference for the way
people think about and make sense of the contexts in which they work” (p. 132).
Harris (1994) suggests that the context of an organization gives rise to
organization-specific schema, that “individuals’ organization-specific schemas are
the repository of cultural knowledge and meanings” (p. 310) and that “the activa-
tion and interaction of these schemas in the social context of the organization
creates the cultural experience for individuals” (p. 310).
Both organizational and societal cultures are constructed by the shared realities
of their constituents (Weick 1995). Once constructed, however, these cultures can
have a certain deterministic function as the range of behavioral choices becomes
limited by the shared reality.

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C.T. Kwantes and S. Glazer, Culture, Organizations, and Work,
Culture, Organizations, and Work, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-47662-9_4
46 4 Organizations and Culture

Social institutionalism provides a particularly interesting approach to under-

standing behavioral choices within cultures, and illustrates how organizational
cultures constrain employee choices. Ingram and Clay (2000) identify three
important characteristics of this approach to understanding culture’s effect on
behaviors. First, bounded rationality affects how decisions are made—employees
may make decisions based on what their own aims and goals are, but they do so
with limited information. Not all available information is “raw” information, but
much of it is often rather heavily imbued with meanings that have been constructed.
For example, an individual who wishes to be in the good graces of her or his boss
may decide to put in extra effort at work by working extra hours without being
asked to. Choosing to do so is the result of the employee making a determination
that this action will be seen in a positive light, that the boss will see this as an
indication of a good worker, rather than the boss interpreting this behavior as the
result of being a poor worker who was unable to complete assigned tasks during
regular work hours due to incompetence or laziness. This determination is the result
of making sense of a situation with limited information. Second, both social and
organizational cultures restrict the potential choices an individual can make. These
cultures each have prohibitions, rules, and norms that limit options available to their
members. Leadership in some cultures may require that a leader behave autocrat-
ically in order to be accepted, while in another culture, a more egalitarian leader is
more accepted. Thus, an employee who wishes to be a leader is constrained with
respect to the options available to being accepted as a leader in different contexts.
Third, the constraints on choices imposed by cultures are, at least ideally, intended
to influence individual choices with the intent of maximizing the likelihood that
individual choices are made such that they are congruent with the good of the
collective, be that society or organization. This particular understanding has been
termed the “choice-within-constraints” theory of new institutionalism.
Organizational culture also has strong links to institutional theory, which says
that “organizations are the product of common understandings and shared inter-
pretations of acceptable norms of collective activity” (Suddaby et al. 2010, p. 1235)
and, as such represent much more than merely the tasks or output that the orga-
nizations were formed around. The attributions related to the meaning of work, the
value placed on particular aspects of work, or roles within the workplace are
therefore the result of consensus in meaning making. Suddaby et al. (2010) further
point out that as people in institutions share perspectives and understandings, the
roles people play in institutions are embedded in these shared frames of references.
Leadership, for example, involves playing a particular role in an institution, and it is
the shared understanding of “what a leader does” that enables individuals to take on
that role and fulfill the expectations of the individuals in the institution. Suddaby
et al. go on to state that “Modern organizations themselves thus reflect the intensive
cultural rationalization of the contemporary world in their constitutive structures”
(p. 1234). In other words, organizational cultures reflect the shared sensemaking of
the individuals in that culture.
4 Organizations and Culture 47

Neoinstitutional researchers have suggested that this perspective may help

explain similarities in organizational cultures within a single societal culture.
DiMaggio and Powell (1983) refer to these similarities as the result of the process
of “isomorphism.” A certain similarity between organizational cultures within
specific societal cultures may result from an attempt (conscious or unconscious) by
decision makers in organizations to reflect the prevailing values and expectations of
the society within which the organization exists, or may be the result of organi-
zations that do not meet societal expectations with respect to expected values,
behaviors, or norms failing and lacking viability in that societal environment
(Kwantes and Dickson 2011). Values, attitudes, and behavior within an organiza-
tion are inextricably linked to behavior in the larger societal context (Johns 2006),
and neoinstitutional theory suggests that “organizational survival is determined by
the extent of alignment with the institutional environment” (Kostova et al. 2008,
p. 997).
Thus, organizations and organizational cultures exist within a larger societal
culture framework, and this nested existence has some important ramifications for
understanding how the interplay between these cultures affects the impact of each
culture individually. One impact of increasing globalism is that organizational
cultures, especially in large multinational organizations, are increasingly likely to
override many aspects of societal cultures. The practices and expectations of large
organizations cut cross social and national boundaries, creating organizational
cultures that minimize societal cultural influence. It is therefore important to also
examine the effect of other forms of culture on organizational culture, recognizing
that there is a confounding effect of culture as well. For example, occupational
culture, or the norms and behavioral expectations within occupations, has a strong
influence on organizational culture (Kwantes and Boglarsky 2004), but occupa-
tional culture itself is confounded with societal culture as societal cultures often
have certain expectations of what qualifications are required for different occupa-
tions as well as the status of different occupations. In some nations, China and
India, for example, engineers have higher status than physicians, whereas in others,
Canada and the USA, for example, physicians have higher status than engineers.
Similarly, the amount of education a nurse must have before qualifying as a nurse is
much less in Hungary than the USA (Glazer and Gyurak 2008).

4.1 Voluntary Versus Involuntary Membership

with an Organization and Its Culture

Whether a person is part of a culture on a voluntary or an involuntary basis has real

implications on her or his adjustment, well-being, and acceptance of behavioral
norms in the culture. For example, when people choose to belong to a group (such
as an organization), their identity with the group will likely be different from those
who did not choose to be part of a group (Tajfel 2010).
48 4 Organizations and Culture

4.1.1 Voluntary

We learn a culture from the groups we grow up in and live among, but we also
experience culture from smaller groups within a culture. Societal cultures are not
homogeneous, and subgroups within any societal culture form around different
experiences, different issues, and different interactions. As such, many of these
smaller cultural groups are ones that are voluntarily joined, such as an organization
for which one chooses to take up employment. Individuals are attracted to join
groups where they have something in common with other group members. This
attraction fosters a group identity—“awareness of and attraction toward an inter-
acting group of interdependent members, by self-identified members of that group”
(Bouas and Arrow 1996, pp. 155–156). Group identification is thought to have its
basis in three different sources, according to Henry et al. (1999). The first is cog-
nitive, meaning social categorization. That is, an individual sees herself or himself
as a member of a particular group. Second is attraction, meaning that an individual
wishes to be a part of that group, while the third basis is behavioral, or focusing on
the interdependence of a given self with other members in the group as well as the
group as a whole.
This idea of group identity suggests that once a group is voluntarily joined, it can
exert a powerful influence over its members. This initial attraction and identification,
followed by group socialization processes furthers the existence of a cohesive set of
values, norms, and behaviors—in other words, culture. We see examples of these
sorts of culture in groups, such as in companies, rotary clubs, fraternities/sororities in
the USA where membership cuts across geographical boundaries, social class, and
even time periods, yet membership still results in a sense of shared values, beliefs,
and behaviors that give meaning to the group’s existence.

4.1.2 Non-voluntary

Group membership need not be voluntary, however, and often is not in organiza-
tional contexts. For example, it is quite common that employees are placed onto
work teams without being asked. Merely belonging to a group for any reason—
even random assignment—seems to be sufficient to promote a feeling of being a
part of that group (Social Identity Theory; Tajfel 2010) as well as promoting
in-group bias (see e.g., Turner et al. 1979). Therefore, attraction need not be at the
heart of being susceptible to group influences, and being a part of a given group
culture. It is not necessary to “like” group members, or to be a voluntary part of a
group that shares aspects of culture with those group members. Drawing on self
categorization theory, Turner et al. (1987) suggest that once an individual joins a
group, socialization processes ensure that individuals “learn the norms, beliefs,
values and ways of behaving that are shared by other members of the group”
(Guimond 2000, p. 337).
4.2 Organizational Cultures 49

4.2 Organizational Cultures

Organizational culture refers to the outcome of overarching values, beliefs, and

assumptions that guide the organization’s implicit and explicit practices, policies,
procedures, and reward systems. The level of analysis is the organization, and
comparisons are made across organizational cultures. An organization’s culture
reveals its strategy for achieving its goals (French et al. 2000) and it tends to be
stable as its development has evolved over time and thus, has deep and strong roots
(Ostroff et al. 2013). However, it is important to emphasize that an organization’s
culture is not static. It is organic, even if slow to change and not easily malleable.
Changing organizational culture is no small task and requires whole-system
changes (i.e., from an organization’s structure to management process to physical
layout of the organization) instead of focal changes in certain domains of interest
(e.g., identifying and defining work roles).
Schein’s (2004) onion model provides a glimpse at the multiple layers that
would require change for an organization’s culture to change. To recap Schein’s
model, the outermost layer included artifacts, the second layer was comprised of
values, and the innermost layer consisted of the assumptions or beliefs. An orga-
nization’s culture is typically traced back to the founder of an organization and the
founder’s beliefs and values guide the organization’s practices. Schein (1983)
points out that, observable aspects of an organization’s culture are fundamentally
reflections of assumptions and beliefs held by people in the organization, which
influence the organization’s values and subsequent behaviors and practices.
Behaviors and practices are visible, surface aspects of an organization’s culture, for
example, office space configuration, norms for interacting with coworkers, and
office dress code.
Schein (1990) suggests that there are four steps inherent in the founding of an
organization that result in an organizational culture. First, the founder of the
organization notices a gap in an existing market, and has an idea for how to fill this
gap. Second, this idea is pitched to others, often likeminded individuals, and the
consensus of this advisory group, if the idea is sound and should be acted upon,
leads to the next step. Third, this founding group then takes actions required to
bring the organization into being by creating a new entity, and fourth, others are
then brought into the group as their expertise and/or other resources are deemed
necessary and advisable, and the history of the group is established. Throughout
this four-step process, and guided by the values of the founder and/or the founding
group, various approaches to reaching the goals related to each developmental step
are tried. The approaches that succeed are adopted as default practices and
behavioral norms. Thus, organizational culture at each of the deep, process, and
surface levels begins to emerge.
Similar to Schein’s (2004) onion model of culture, but in the context of orga-
nizational cultures, Erez and Gati (2004) also used the onion metaphor to describe a
nested model of culture with multiple layers and influence. They position global
culture at the outermost layer of the model, and individual culture (culture within
50 4 Organizations and Culture

the person) at the core, with organizational culture being one of the layers in
between global and individual cultures. In recognition of increasing globalization,
they suggest that these layers can influence each other through both bottom-up
(from individual to world) and top-down (world business needs to individual)
influences. In fact, they developed the concept of “glocal” culture (p. 595)
specifically in the domain of international business by highlighting the reciprocal
influences of global culture and the innermost individual culture (see Fig. 4.1).
While artifacts of culture (whether tangible or intangible, such as how people
address one another) are easily observed, merely describing culture is not enough to
really understand culture. In fact, Schneider and colleagues (e.g., Schneider and
Gunnarson 1996; Schneider et al. 1994; Schneider and Rentsch 1988) argue that
culture can be best understood by the rationale for why things happen in an orga-
nization the way they do.
The extent to which the founder and/or founding group has a long lasting effect
on organizational culture is variable; however, Ogbonna and Harris (2001) note that
a number of circumstantial factors, such as a change in CEO, a merger or

Fig. 4.1 The dynamic of top-down-bottom-up processes across the levels of culture. Adapted
from Erez and Gati (2004). Copyright 2004 by Wiley. Adapted with permission
4.2 Organizational Cultures 51

acquisition, can result in large organizational culture shifts as the organization

adapts to a new business environment, a change in leadership, or both. Further, it is
important to note that as organizations grow, organizational cultures become less
homogeneous. Organizational cultures may be “strong” cultures, with values deeply
held across all or almost all employees, or “weak” with little consensus or adher-
ence to organizational values and norms.

4.2.1 Organizational Cultures in Context

While work and organizations provide particular types of contexts with their own
norms, goals, and expectations, those contexts are nested within the culture of the
society and/or nation within which the organization exists. The relationship
between the societal and organizational cultural contexts is complex. At the more
macro end of the spectrum, societal culture is arguably more influential as it sets the
default pattern that individuals or employees use to understand situations (Triandis
1995). However, competent functioning at work requires decoding the organiza-
tional environment and making sense of the goals, norms, and behaviors of those in
the organization (Harris 1994). Gelfand et al. (2008) suggested that there are three
ways in which societal and organizational cultures may interact, given that each
culture reflects a different context in which behaviors or outcomes could take place.
First, they suggest that contextual factors may amplify various aspects of culture.
When amplification happens, specific cultural norms and/or values are more likely
to be salient, thereby increasing the strength of the effect on behaviors. This situ-
ation would typically reflect dominant societal culture norms which are either
reflected in a given organizational culture or supersede that organizational culture.
Second, culture suppressors may exist, where specific aspects of organizational
culture may suppress the expression of societal culture norms and/or values. The
third and final context effect posited by Gelfand and colleagues is that of culture
reversers. They suggest that it is possible that constraints in the working environ-
ment, or expectations of organizational culture, may actually reverse the expression
of societal culture norms and/or values.

4.2.2 Perspectives on Organizational Culture

Understanding that an organizational culture reflects some level of shared meaning,

and explicitly recognizing that an organization’s culture is not always monolithic
require a more careful scrutiny into what assumptions are used in determining just
what organizational culture is. Martin (1992) proposes that three different per-
spectives (i.e., integration, differentiation, and fragmentation) underpin both the
different definitions of culture and the strategies researchers take in defining the
methodological approach to studying organizational culture. Arguably, these three
52 4 Organizations and Culture

perspectives reflect implicit understandings of how culture operates. An integra-

tionist approach to understanding culture specifically focuses on commonalities,
whereas a fragmented or differentiation approach focuses on subcultures within a
larger culture (Martin and Frost 1999).
Researchers that have undertaken an integrationist perspective assume that
consensus across an organization on values and norms represents the organization’s
culture, as it reflects a shared understanding by all employees. This perspective
reflects a certain degree of objectivism in organizational culture, as it assumes that a
culture is clear to all who exist within it. Further, this approach is based on “claims
that cultures [are] characterized by consistency, organization-wide consensus, and
clarity” and the assumption that this will then lead to “greater organizational
effectiveness, as indicated by greater cognitive clarity, commitment, control, pro-
ductivity, and profitability” (Martin 1992, p. 61). Emphasis on clarity reinforces an
organizational culture that exerts an informational influence, clarifying for its
members what is and is not important to pay attention to, and what behaviors are
expected. Martin (1992) suggests an appropriate metaphor for this perspective is a
“clearing in a jungle” (p. 52).
The differentiation perspective views organizational culture as a collection of
numerous subcultures with overlapping norms around values and behaviors. The
fact that these subcultures overlap gives the appearance of a single, uniform
organizational culture when in fact such a single culture does not exist. Martin
(1992) notes that the elements of the differentiation perspective are “inconsistency,
subcultural consensus, and the relegation of ambiguity to the periphery of sub-
cultures” (p. 83). Inconsistency results from differing interpretation of events and
therefore differences in the meaning ascribed to a given event. For example,
rebranding may reflect a renewed and streamlined approach to the organizational
mission for some, a totally new organizational mission for others, and a reflection of
misused time and organizational resources to others. People in different “pockets”
of organizational cultures who interpret organizational events differently from
people in other “pockets,” but who have consensus within a given “pocket,” then
reflect a subculture in an organization. Employees in these subcultures share
meaning systems and understandings that in turn give rise to norms of values and
behaviors within each of the subcultural groups. This perspective suggests that
ambiguity is relegated to the edge of the various subcultures, as subcultures provide
clarity within themselves only. Any ambiguity around cultural differences is
assumed to be the result of no subculture forming to address and clarify the
ambiguous situation. As Martin suggests, the best metaphor for this is that “sub-
cultures are islands of clarity; ambiguity is channeled into the currents that swirl
around the edges of these islands” (Martin 1992, p. 94).
In contrast, the fragmentation perspective focuses directly on ambiguities around
meaning in organizations, and in doing so explicitly recognizes the complexity of
organizational functioning. This perspective views organizational culture as
implicitly pluralistic, and as a postmodern approach to understanding organizational
culture (Martin 1992). It reflects a recognition that organizational boundaries are
permeable with respect to issues in the societies within which they are embedded
4.2 Organizational Cultures 53

(such as racism, sexism, poverty, and other social issues). It also reflects a recog-
nition that organizational cultures change as the world of work is rapidly changing.
These changes in the work world are the result of a number of factors including, but
not limited to, technological advances and increasing globalization and result in a
dynamic and changing culture in an organization. The best metaphor for this
approach to understanding organizational culture is a web, as it highlights the fact
that facets in an organization are related to many other different facets (Martin
1992). This approach views consensus as the result of individuals coalescing
around issues, thereby paying attention to particular events and or facets of the
organization, and the connections between those.

4.2.3 Leadership and Organizational Cultures

According to Schein (2004) culture develops from “(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 assump-
tions brought in by new members and leaders” (p. 225). Leadership, then, is critical
to organizational culture, as organizational culture begins to develop from the
values, direction, mission, and practices of an organization’s founder as well as
successive leaders. George et al. (1999) point out that the organizational vision that
leaders develop and communicate to employees is a key leadership activity in
organizations. Building on Schein’s (2004) description of how leader behaviors
actually impact organizational culture, George et al. suggest that after an organi-
zational leader articulates a vision, s/he influences organizational members in five
key ways. These influences are a result of the leader’s (1) attention pattern (pay
attention—to what and how), (2) reactions to critical incidents, (3) role modeling,
(4) allocation of rewards and status, [and] (5) process and bases for new hires and
promotions (p. 555). In these ways, leadership is critical to developing, maintain-
ing, and reinforcing an organizational culture.
In addition to leadership behaviors having an impact on organizational culture,
personality traits of leaders may also be directly linked to organizational culture.
Giberson et al. (2009) empirically tested this notion by examining links between
organizational leaders’ personality, values, and organizational culture. While the
relationship between CEO values and organizational culture is not particularly
strong, there is enough evidence for the authors to claim that their study “provides
initial empirical evidence that organizational culture values are, at least to some
extent, a reflection of the CEO’s personality” (Giberson et al., p. 133).
While the evidence is clear that leadership in general has a direct effect on
organizational culture, specific types of leadership may have particular effects.
Jaskyte (2010) found, for example, that transformational leadership typically results
in higher cultural consensus. Cultural consensus reflects agreement among
employees about the organizational culture, indicating that the organization is a
strong culture as recognized and understood by organizational members. Ethical
54 4 Organizations and Culture

leadership also has specific effects on organizational culture. For example, Toor and
Ofori (2009) found that ethical leadership links to organizational cultures charac-
terized by trust and feelings of belonging on the part of employees, as well as
having an impact on employee willingness to put in extra effort on behalf of the
organization.
The relationship between leadership and culture, however, is not unidirectional,
as leadership may initiate and, to an extent, mold organizational culture, but that
culture will in turn support particular leader behaviors. For example, in a study of
222 public relations executives, Meng (2014) found
… participants’ recognition of the importance of having an organizational culture which
values communication efforts, supports clear statements of objectives emphasizing coop-
eration and teamwork, and encourages open communication among organizational mem-
bers. The results further confirmed that it is not enough to just put an excellent
communication team in place to wait for the chance to confirm the efforts they can bring to
improve organization performance. Rather, the success of communication leaders should be
able to actively influence organizational culture, to foster a culture that embraces com-
munication efforts, which can further encourage, value, and share open communication
among members. Thus, the direct and positive influence of public relations leadership on
organizational culture cannot be ignored (pp. 378–379).

Similarly, organizational culture can mediate the relationship between leadership

behavior and employee attitudes toward the organization such as organizational
commitment (Simosi and Xenikou 2010). Leadership behaviors can have a direct
effect on various employee attitudes, but evidence suggests that the type of orga-
nizational culture an employee is in may buffer a negative relationship, with a
positive organizational culture reducing negative effects of some leadership
behaviors. Alternatively, a positive relationship between leader behaviors and
employee outcomes can be enhanced by a positive organizational culture. Thus, the
relationship between leadership and organizational culture is complex, with
potential bidirectional impact as well as organizational culture serving as a mediator
or moderator variable on the relationship between leadership and employee
responses to that leadership.

4.2.4 Organizational Culture Change

Organizational culture change is a process that focuses on realigning an organi-

zation’s goals, structure, and technology in order to move the organization toward a
desired organizational culture (Howard and Associates 1994). Using principles of
organizational development, a systematic method for gathering and analyzing data
about how an organization is functioning in terms of its social systems, and
implementing and evaluating change, organizational culture change can only occur
when visible, audible, or tangible aspects of the organization are modified (Schein
1990). However, these tangible aspects of the organization are predicated on
underlying norms, values, and beliefs. Creating organizational culture change
4.2 Organizational Cultures 55

necessitates discovering the underlying elements of culture that are keeping the
organization from change and then reshaping organizational values, norms, and
beliefs to endorse attitudes and behaviors that reflect the desired culture (Schein
2006). To jolt change, organizations will often create cognitive dissonance among
the organization’s employees who will work toward reducing the dissonance by
implementing strategies that move organizations toward change (Schein 1990). In
other words, change happens when employees perceive a disconnect or an
incompatibility with “the way things are” and “the way things should be” if a
particular state is desired. An organizational culture that values tradition is likely to
change only if it becomes clear to employees that the traditional methods of work
are not profitable when competitors have more modern approaches and are
increasing their market share as a result, for example.
Creating organizational culture change requires support from top management
(Beckhard 1969) who are responsible for improving an organization’s visioning
(developing a picture of a desired future), empowering others to make change
(Argyris 1998), initiating a learning process (interactive listening and
self-examining process; French and Bell 1999), and engaging in problem-solving
(diagnose situation, solve problems, make decisions, and take actions) through
collaborative management (participation in creating and managing a culture; Schein
2006), and emphasizing interactive work teams (organization’s building blocks;
Nirenberg 1994). In order to initiate organizational culture change, organizations
will first change organizational structures, institute new processes, and create new
principles to guide affect, behaviors, and cognitions that will then become nor-
mative in the new organizational system. Thus, in organizational culture change
efforts, the system is the target of change, while the people within the organization
become the instruments of change (Schein 2006).

4.3 Multinational Corporations

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are complex systems that require a focused

strategy to uphold a worldwide organizational culture. It is therefore imperative that
those in leadership roles identify the factors that are of greatest strategic importance
and those that are less important. For example, some have indicated that Euro
Disney was a failure initially due to the executives’ inability to “let go” of what was
less important and to retain characteristics that are truly fundamental to the strategic
growth of the company (Brannen 2004). According to Brannen (2004), Disney
failed to recontextualize its brand in Paris, effectively omitting to give the brand a
new meaning in new cultural contexts. For Americans, practices and services
associated with Disney, such as the extreme customer service orientation and
personnel management systems, as well as the cowboy motif, representing rugged
individualism, were all interpreted by the French as abnormal customer service,
illegal personnel practices, and carefree individualism. Moreover, Disney was
attempting to take the American fantasy of European fairytales back to its place of
56 4 Organizations and Culture

origin. In essence, many cultural factors, including cultural values, beliefs, and
norms were not taken into consideration, and thus the globalization efforts were
originally met with resistance at the local organizational level.
According to Weick (1976), MNCs that are extremely tight and rigid in their
organizational culture, and therefore fail to employ flexibility and recontextual-
ization, are bound to break. Tightly coupled systems (as Weick refers to the rela-
tionship between organizational structures that are rigid), such as bureaucracies,
lack the variability to attend to significant changes, as opposed to loosely coupled
(i.e., flexible) systems which have the resources for all elements of the system to
respond integratively, while each element (e.g., subsystem) remains distinct
(Spender and Grinyer 1995). Thus, when organizational systems are loosely cou-
pled, the systems’ boundaries are permeable and can absorb changes without
affecting the MNC’s fundamental strategy. While some MNCs are capable of
engaging in a uniformed global strategic action (Hannan and Carroll 1995), MNCs
probably operate best when thought of as an “interorganizational grouping” as
opposed to a single organization (Ghoshal and Bartlett 1990, p. 604). By consid-
ering an MNC as a grouping of multiple organizations, executives are probably
more open to allowing each element to run its unit autonomously while still
maintaining interdependency. As Weick (1976) wrote, elements (of structures) of
loosely coupled systems are still tied together, but the knot is loose or with minimal
interdependence. Thus, “…loose coupling encourages individual elements to make
adaptations to local circumstances or events” (Koff et al. 1994, p. 3) without
straining the subsidiaries located in different countries. Furthermore, it is important
to recognize that the onus of change is not only on the MNC that must adapt to local
preferences, but local firms must also learn to adapt to new situations that are not
opposing and hurting their laws, value systems, and beliefs (Kao et al. 1990). Thus,
the most effective approach to developing an organizational culture is likely to be
characterized by what Martin would term “differentiation” as each local subculture
maintains both a level of similarity with the local subcultures in other geographical
areas of the MNC, but also exhibits a distinctiveness reflecting an adaptation to the
local environment.

4.4 Industry Cultures

The particular industry within which an organization exists may also provide
boundaries for culture. Unlike organizational cultures bounded by geopolitical or
regional differences, some aspects of organizational culture may differ with respect
to the purpose of the organization, or the industrial environment within which the
organization exists. Some institutional theorists (e.g., Dosi 1982) suggest that there
are shared meanings and assumptions for organizations within a particular context
since organizations exist within particular economic and social environments, and
there are reasons to assume that industries can constitute such a particularistic
environment. An interesting approach to this idea was carried out in a single
4.4 Industry Cultures 57

societal setting, California, but in two different industrial settings—wineries and

museums. Using Schein’s (1985) framework, Phillips (1994) specifically examined
differences in five categories of cultural assumptions: (1) the relationship between
the group and the environment, (2) the nature of reality and truth, (3) the nature of
innate human nature, (4) the nature of human activity, and (5) the nature of human
relationships. Her findings suggest that there are, indeed, shared mindsets among
members of organizations within specific industries—in other words, a shared
cultural understanding of some basic assumptions. More specifically, she purports
that within the same industry there are similarities in how individuals view strategic
issues, such as how competitors are identified and group boundaries are demar-
cated, how interpersonal work relationships are formed and maintained, such as
lines and patterns of communication, and how social matters are addressed, such as
purpose of work, but across industries these factors differ. Other examples of
industries creating boundaries around cultural assumptions, and therefore organi-
zational cultures, come from areas such as the hospitality industry, which has been
described as having unique contextual factors related to work performance (Chen
et al. 2012), as the combinations of physical demands and service interactions
between employees and customers have emerged as important factors affecting the
work environment (cf., Shani et al. 2014).

4.5 Organizational Cultures Around Issues

In recognition that shared understandings can revolve around specific issues in an

organizational setting, a number of researchers have started qualifying the term
“organizational culture” to emphasize a specific shared understanding about a
particular aspect of the work environment. Two examples of these well-researched
cultures around issues are safety cultures and health cultures. Below is a description
of both; they are presented as examples of culture topics that may be addressed in
this series.

4.5.1 Safety Culture

Safety culture refers to behaviors, values, norms, and assumptions about safety that
are endorsed in an organization (Mearns et al. 1998; Mearns and Flin 2001). It is an
enduring feature of an organization (Moran and Volkwein 1992) and can explain
why certain behaviors occur (or do not occur; Schneider et al. 1994). Most studies of
safety culture are conducted in nuclear plants (e.g., Hofmann et al. 1995), off-shore
oil installations (e.g., Mearns et al. 1998), rail transportation (e.g., Clarke 1999;
Edkins and Pollock 1996; Sherry 1991), road work (e.g., Niskanen 1994), factories
or manufacturing companies (Cheyne et al. 1998; Goldberg et al. 1991; Hofmann
and Morgeson 1999; Zohar 1980, 2000), and aviation (Díaz and Cabrera 1997;
58 4 Organizations and Culture

Edkins 1998). An organization that has a strong safety culture is likely part of a
high-risk industry characterized by work activities that could compromise the safety
and well-being of its employees and other relevant stakeholders (Ostroff et al. 2013).
An organization’s culture develops over time. The extent to which an organization
may have a strong safety culture would be impacted by multiple factors (Gibbons
et al. 2006), including the depth of the organizational system’s values related to
(a) the protection of its stakeholders,
(b) care for people’s well-being,
(c) clear processes for the upkeep of equipment,
(d) documentation protocols to address any deviant or unexpected events that
might compromise or have compromised safety,
(e) high engagement of people throughout the entire organization, and
(f) having dedicated personnel to help educate and improve upon the organiza-
tion’s safety strategy.
An organization’s safety culture often manifests in observed artifacts, including
signs posting how many days a company has been accident-free, safety checklists
that people must complete as part of their work routine, and posted signs reminding
people about protocols for safe behaviors. Safety culture is normally assessed at the
organizational level and compared to other similar organizations. Thus, measure-
ment of safety culture is rolled up to the level of the organization and analyses are
performed at that group level (Zohar 2003). Some of the factors assessed include
leadership communication and style (e.g., communicating tolerance of risk
behaviors or safety compliance and reinforcing innovation for risk prevention),
psychosocial stressors (e.g., that might impact the extent to which people in a social
network implicitly or explicitly reinforce expectations for risky or safety behaviors),
organizational politics, reward and punishment structures, training and development
opportunities (Glazer et al. 2004).
An organization that reinforces preventative activities believes that “an ounce of
prevention is worth a pound of cure” (Benjamin Franklin). As many organizations,
which emphasize risk prevention activities, are functioning in high-risk industries,
those that embrace Franklin’s belief are likely to be more effective in their line of
work than those organizations that do not. For example, airlines that follow the
minimum equipment list guidelines (Gibbons et al. 2006) of the U.S. Federal
Aviation Authority and require every pilot to physically walk around an aircraft and
thoroughly complete a checklist are more likely to have a good safety record than
airlines that skirt some of those protocols. And, while profitability is inevitably a
driver for any company, its success will only be as good as effectiveness. For an
airline, getting passengers and crew safely to another destination is ultimately a sign
of its effectiveness.
Safety cultures are affected therefore by both policies and practices, or norms.
Organizations that emphasize safety culture programs may still find themselves
facing serious injuries and death if subcultures within the organization undermine
organizational efforts toward safety. Thus, creating a strong and unified safety
culture is paramount if the positive results of such a culture are to be realized.
4.5 Organizational Cultures Around Issues 59

4.5.2 Health Culture

Similar to findings related to safety culture, organizations promoting personal and

group activities that reinforce a healthy workforce are ones that have strong health
cultures. Healthy behaviors that are practiced by people throughout the entire
organization are reinforced in policy statements released by leadership and leaders’
actions that demonstrate authentic desire to align components of the organization in
order to achieve strategic goals. Example practices that are embedded within
policies found in some organizations include clear statements regarding the
importance of work–nonwork life balance and encouraging (with time and avail-
ability) engagement with wellness programs offered within the company or access
to wellness programs near to where employees live (with company reimbursement).
In organizations with strong health cultures, public statements are accompanied by
employee access to the services being offered. Example services include offering
only healthy snack and drink options in vending machines or cafeterias, creating
more opportunities for social support, and supervisory modeling of healthy work
behaviors (Golaszewski et al. 2008).
Despite efforts toward creating health cultures, health issues occur in a work-
force. Employee health issues may result from physical problems such as chronic
pain, cancers, or fatigue or from psychological problems such as depression or
anxiety (Loeppke et al. 2009). Organizations typically have policies in place to
guide how employees should behave when faced with these conditions—or, in
other words, how these conditions should be thought of and acted upon. Buck et al.
(2011) suggest, “people’s beliefs, attitudes, and social norms as well as more
objective contextual factors are important in understanding presenteeism, absen-
teeism, and return-to-work behaviour” (p. 502). Organizations, through their poli-
cies as well as through the health culture within the organization, place both explicit
and implicit expectations on employees. For example, at some organizations senior
workers may model to more junior employees that showing up to work regardless
of health conditions is considered the proper “work ethic” at that organization
(Baker-McClearn et al. 2010), thereby resulting in high rates of presenteeism.
Presenteeism refers to an employee’s attendance at work despite being physically or
mentally unwell (Garczynski et al. 2013), which leads to underperformance and
burnout (Ferreira and Martinez 2012). To eradicate these unhealthy practices, some
organizations have begun to eliminate setting a maximum number of sick day
restrictions in order to avoid presenteeism, thus also exhibiting support for a strong
health culture.
Even organizations that promote health cultures might have times when the
organization, knowingly or unknowingly, propagates a stress climate, in which an
organization does not handle challenges and demands in a timely and transparent
manner, thereby creating more appraisals of distress and fewer appraisals of eus-
tress among its employees (Kozusznik et al. 2015). In order to inhibit a stress
climate, organizations must develop, employ, and monitor implementation of
organizational policies and promote organizational norms for a health culture.
60 4 Organizations and Culture

As a culture around an issue, as with safety cultures, it is important to recognize

the two strongest influences on this culture—that of organizational policies and that
of employee norms. While organizational policies apply to all employees in an
organization, how they are interpreted and enacted upon may differ depending on
subcultures in an organization. Despite official organizational policies related to
how to handle illness, “pockets” within an organization may enact or even con-
tradict these policies through strong subcultural norms. Nicholson and Johns (1985)
refer to an “absence culture” as the opposite of a health culture and note that this
culture has been found to vary across national samples, occupations, organizations
and units within an organization, strongly suggesting that subcultures within an
organization may have behavioral norms that differ from the stated policies of the
organization as a whole. More recently, cultures around health have been impacted
by the increasingly widespread use of wellness programs in the workplace.
Advocates for wellness programs in the workplace suggest that these programs are
closely tied to the culture of an organization (Ginn and Henry 2003) although
findings suggest that these programs are not always equally endorsed throughout an
organization (Juniper 2011).

4.6 Intraorganizational Cultures

In medium-sized to large-sized organizations, multiple units and multiple sites can

easily operate in the absence of much interaction with other parts of the larger
organization or with headquarters, resulting in a loose organizational culture. As a
result, the head of a unit or site typically drives the unit’s and/or site’s culture,
which may or may not align well with the organization’s culture overall.
Sometimes, different activities in different organizational units and sites of large
organizations may require that unit or site cultures differ. For example, a plant
operations unit must maintain a safety culture and avoid risk-taking, whereas the
marketing and sales unit of that same organization must take risks and demonstrate
creativity. Similarly, a site geographically located far from headquarters might need
to incorporate practices, procedures, and policies that fit the greater societal culture
it exists in. An example of this may be seen in a single MNC offering free
condiments in U.S. fast food locations, but charging for condiments in some
Eastern European fast food locations. While organizational culture looseness may
be a positive in situations such as this, allowing an organization to adapt to
demands of specific locales, there are times when misalignment of unit cultures
with organizational cultures results in attrition and possibly a need to rebuild a unit.
There may be times when a site culture’s inability to align with the headquarters
might cause headquarters to withdraw from the site. A misalignment of cultures
may also result in the need for personnel changes, such as the case when an
organization’s leadership fails to recognize the need for a unit to operate differently.
Even when personnel changes occur, however, both overarching organizational
cultures, as well as subcultures tend to maintain their cultures at various levels.
4.6 Intraorganizational Cultures 61

Schneider (1987) and Schneider et al. (1995) suggested that four processes are
responsible for the continuation of organizational culture over time: attraction,
selection, socialization, and attrition. This framework is one that incorporates an
understanding of organizational culture from both the group level and the individual
level (Schneider et al. 1995). Consistent with other theorists, as noted above, this
approach to understanding organizational culture starts with the values and norms
laid out by the founder or founding group of the organization; however, this
approach focuses on and addresses continuation and consistency in organizational
culture rather than the culture’s founding. What happens after those initial norms
are established is viewed as an iterative process between the organizational level
(organizational culture, or shared values and norms) and the individual employee
level (values and preferred behavioral norms).
Attraction to an organization occurs as the result of an implicit or explicit
evaluation by a prospective employee of the culture of the organization, and the
extent to which s/he finds that culture appealing. A positive assessment of an
organization would result in an individual including an organization in her/his job
search, and then applying for employment with a given organization. The selection
process mirrors this evaluation, but at the organizational level. As organizations
assess various candidates for positions, an evaluation of the degree to which can-
didates might be expected to fit in with the culture of the organization plays a role in
determining which candidates will be selected to join that organization. Once the
selection occurs, and candidates become employees, socialization occurs, where the
organizational culture is taught to the newcomers, and the new employees again
assess their fit with the organization as they start the job and see the degree to which
their initial impression of the organizational culture is correct or not. The attrition
process occurs if and when employees realize that the expected fit is not a good one
after all, and they opt to leave the organization.
Thus, organizational culture is maintained by attracting and selecting the types
of prospective employees who share the same values as are found in an organi-
zation, and who may therefore be expected to fit in well. The culture is further
maintained by self-selection out of the organization by employees who do not share
a match with the values of the organization or a preference for the surface, or
behavioral, level of a given organizational culture. While not all employees in an
organization endorse aspects of organizational culture to the same extent, this
model does provide an understanding of the processes that keep an organizational
culture relatively stable, despite individual differences and personnel change.

4.7 Team Cultures

As Erez and Gati (2004) note in their glocal model of cultures (see Fig. 4.1), there
are multiple layers of cultures within organizations. In addition to an organizational
culture and a culture based on specific issues, such as safety and health, divisions,
62 4 Organizations and Culture

units, or departments of an organization also have subcultures within the larger

organizational culture. These cultures partly adopt characteristics of the entire
organization, but also reinforce their own characteristics. Similar to a person who is
bicultural and is able to frame switch her or his behaviors based on the cultural
environment s/he is in, employees of an organization are able to switch their frames
of reference depending on the situation they are in within the organization. For
example, a supervisor of an organizational unit might reinforce a team culture of
open dialog and contribution within the team, but when in a larger
organization-wide briefing, otherwise vocal contributors might remain quiet. Thus,
while a team culture reinforces egalitarian values among team contributors, the
organization culture might reinforce hierarchy values. Still, an organization’s
practices do influence a team’s effectiveness when considering organization-wide
reward systems (that reinforce behaviors based on individual or group perfor-
mance), educational systems (that offer training and development opportunities),
and information systems (that provide or limit access to relevant data; Hackman
1990).
Another important feature in today’s organizations is the advent of global teams
that work across geographic boundaries, time, and space (see, e.g., Glazer et al.
2012). The formation of global teams is typically motivated by a desire to have the
strongest personnel contributors working toward addressing an organizational need.
Global team members communicate with each other, synchronously and/or asyn-
chronously, through computer-mediated communication and therefore these teams
are often referred to as global virtual teams (GVTs; aka transnational or globally
distributed teams). GVTs can perform their jobs anywhere and anytime around the
globe. They develop their own team culture, often influenced by the headquarters,
particularly if the lead project manager is from the headquarters. To date, there is
little research on team cultures of GVTs and how the GVT’s culture shapes team
and individual performance, though there are studies looking at team dynamics
(e.g., Maznevski and Chudobo 2000).

4.8 Summary

This chapter focused on the organization and varying components that may be
addressed by contributions to this series. In particular, concepts related to the
situation of the organization as embedded in layers between the person and both the
nation and industry environment, organizational culture, types of organizational
cultures, and teams within organizations were introduced. In the next section we
focus on the individual contributors in the workplace, focusing on the concept of
work, work roles, occupations, attributes of the person, person perceptions of sit-
uations, and the role of human resources in selecting contributors and developing
their competencies.
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