M. Ü. iktisadi ve idari Bilimler Fakültesi Dergisi Yı/:2000, Cilt: XVl, Sayı: 1, Sayfa: 31-38
THE ROLE OF CULTURE iN
THE MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE
Tülay BOZKURT*
ABSTRACT
Managing change has become one of the key issues of the 90s: re-engineering business processes, implementing quality management programmes, entering new markets ali cali for
effective management of change. In implementing change programmes managers and con-sultants often ignore the effect of culture. Not only can change programmes bring about a change in organisational culture, but also the organisational culture may have either a positive or negative effect on the success of the change programme. This paper focuses on the role of culture in organisational change and development. The author proposes the use ofa footprint method of modelling culture. This method, it is argued, can help identify gaps and overlaps between various levels of culture to aid in the management of change.
INTRODUCTION
The popularity of the study of organisational or corporate culture in organisa-tional change is not reflective of what has been achieved in the fıeld. The manage-ment of cultural change is a daunting task itself, indeed, as there has been a lack of understanding and ambiguity in designing a conceptual framework partly due to the nature of the terms. The term culture itself is surrounded by a myriad of problems relating to its operational defınitions, and as it must have been experienced by the change agents there is no a clear middle or end in change processes and few people ever agree on what really happened if it really happened at all. Therefore the identi-fıcation of the variables and aspects of culture is essential for the strategic imple-mentation of change to be aligned with the culture itself. It is a decision for managers to make whether to realise a shop-floor reorganisation or transformational change which require different strategies to apply. In any of these attempts the aspects of existing culture if not understood can present a serious barrier to successful achieve-ment of change.
In the literature there are a number of examples where lack of recognition of culture and the need for cultural alignment has resulted in unsuccessful attempts to change. The theory that the alignment of culture and strategy contribute to corporate * Doç. Dr., University of Marmara Istanbul, Turkey.
Tı'ilay Bozkurt
performance, or the "fit" theory, stemmed from the work of Lorsh ( 1967) or it could be argued, from the earlier work of Burns and Stalker ( 196 J. ). There has been a
grow-ing consensus in the literature (Smircich 1983, Alldire and Firsirotu 1984,
Trompenaars 1993, Alvesson 1995) on the relevance of this theory, and certainly Schein, Lorsh and Davies works ha ve all contributed to the acceptance of this theory. AT Keamey ( 1992), in their survey of companies implementing total quality management, identified that 80% of the TQM programmes fail to deliver their expected benefits. It is argued that one of the critical reasons behind the failure TQM programmes is that the beliefs and practices called for in a TQM strategy fails to align with the loca! culture (i.e. the culture of the people the programme is trying to change). Bititci and McTaggart (1994) present a case study where change was suc-cessfully achieved in the first instance. But as the change programme came to an end, where the management expected to new practices to continue, the changes achieved very quickly deteriorated and led to the adoption of the original working practices.
The contribution of this article is to put forward a "footprint" method to model culture and to identify the gaps and overlaps between various levels of culture to aid in the management of change.
WHAT IS CULTURE?
The culture concept has been the theoretical advantage to provide a
conceptu-al bridge between micro and macro level of analysis and between organisational behaviour and strategic management (Smircich 1983). In spite of its growing
impor-tance and popularity in management applications there is no a definition of culture
everybody has agreed upon. Nevertheless the underlying assumption implicit in these definitions is that culture embeds shared meaning such as; collectively shared forms of cognition, values, beliefs, understanding, ideologies, rules, norms, symbols, emo-tions, expressiveness, the unconscious behaviour patterns, structures, practices and symbolic manifestation such as:- language, jargons, rituals, myths, sagas, stories (Alvesson 1995, Trompeenars 1993, Allaire and Firsirotu 1984, Hofstede et al 1990).
A practical definition for culture comes from Schein
(1986):-"A pattern of basic assumptions invented, discovered or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problem of external adapta-tion and internal integraadapta-tion that has worked well enough to be con-sidered valid, and to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relation to these problems ".
This definition implies that culture moulds the way people in an organisation see the world. Since what one sees depends on where one stands, environmental changes invariably are perceived differently by employees who belong to different national, loca!, professional, departmental, loca! and other sub-cultures. Therefore culture should play a dominating role in the responses of top management to
ongo-ing changes as well as employees abilities and willingness to go along with
Prof Dı'. ismail Özaslan 'a Armağan
LAYERS OF CULTURE
ln order to answer what we should change we should analyse various layers of
culture. There have been so many attempts to identify these layers and among those
Schein's (1986), Trompenaar's (1993) and McAuley's (1995) frameworks showing three layers of culture has become the standard benchmark. The authors
interpreta-tion and integration of these three layered framework is shown in Figure 1.
Objects and lcuns Ways of Dressing LAYERI 1-listory Vehicles of Culture (Concrete and Tangible)
Exprcssivc
Documentaıion
Myths and sagas
Process of Cultural Coınınunication (Norms and Values)
Common Sense Valued ldeology Collusivc Elemen ıs
Figure 1. The layers of culture.
Hcroic Character
The first la yer of culture consists of variables which are concrete and tangible which is explicit culture. Explicit culture is the observable reality of the language, food, buildings, houses, monuments, agriculture, fashion and art. These tangibles are the symbols of deeper dimensions; but their importance are somehow overestimated in change practices, may be due to the fact that prejudices and first impressions are mostly developed based on the observations of such symbols so changing them has been considered as a culture change itself since it would change the ways how oth-ers perceive an organisation. But this is not the case as proved by numerous experi-ences of organisations and it is not a change
but cosmetic manipulation
The second layer of culture which is deeper is reflected within the first, i.e. tangible layer. The second layer of culture consists of norms and values of an indi-vidual group. Norms are the mutual sense a group has of what is right and wrong thus defining how one normally should behave. Norms can develop on forma! and informal level and there may be differences in these norms as in some cases informal norms may contradict with the forma! norms. Values, on the other hand refer to the definition of good and bad closely related to the ideals shared by a group and it gives
Tülay Bozkurt
us a feeling of how one aspires or desires to behave. What is desired which is values and what is actually there which is norms can not be always in line with each other. For example top managers ofa multinational company might want its employees in a foreign country to agree with the value that "Hard work is essential to success". Yet the behavioural norm sanctioned by the group may be "Do not work harder than the other group members than we would all be expected to do more and end up worse off'. Here the norm differs from the value which could be released and understood through rigorous analysis preceding change. it takes shared meanings of nom1s and values that are stable and salient for a group's cultural tradition to be developed and elaborated.
The third layer which is the locus of culture consists of assumptions and unconscious elements. In order to study cultural traditions which mould the essence of human interactions we should go back the core of human existence which is assumptions. it is the underlying concept in pursuit of reasons for differences between consciously and subconsciously chosen different definitions of good or bad, right or wrong. Cultural assumptions are developed as people fınd the ways to deal most effectively with their environrnents, given their available sources. If that par-ticular way has proved as the only stable and obvious solution to continuous prob-lems it will gradually disappear from consciousness and become "taken for granted". The following example will help to be more elaborate on the issue. In a given organ-isation when people encounter with a new task or problem, the altemative approach, usually offered or imposed by the top management will be ofa value status since it serves asa criterion to determine a choice from existing altematives and open to the judgements , critics and even rejections of other members of the group. If this ini-tially imposed "ideal way" of behaving proves successful in applications it will go through a cognitive transformation and will be intemalised as "taken for granted fact", i.e. it will be absorbed in to the unconscious elements of culture and will become and assumption.
Therefore assumptions underlines the fact that effectiv e management of change, where change is long term and beneficial, requires a historical accumulation of the shared experiences that ha ve proved to be more effective and reliable than the old existing ones. Otherwise changes in values and missions will be of minor impor-tance if they are cosmetic and remain in outer layers of culture. In the long run change wil! stick and remain only if it penetrates into the. loci of culture. This mes-sage, which is critical to successful management of change, is also illustrated in Figure 1.
DIMENSIONS OF CULTURAL ASSUMPTIONS
Various researcher have attempted to analyse assumptions through qualitative and quantitative methods. Among those Trompenaars'(1993) classifıcation inspired by the studies of Schein (1986) and relatively of Hofstede (1985) are notable. Hofstede (1985) articulates that every culture distinguishes itself from others by the solutions it chooses to certain problems. it is convenient to look at these problems un der three headings:
-• Relationships with other people individualism v collectivism task orientation v humarı orientation universalism v particularism specific v diffuse achievement v ascription neutral v emotional • Passage of time linear v circular • The environment internal v external
Prof Dı: İsmail Özaslan 'a Armağan
These assumptions differ among countries and even among the subcultures within a country; as such requires a basic phenomenal understanding of their reflec-tions to the work behaviours, to foresee and reconcile the dilemmas between "what is there" and "what is wanted to be there" which would otherwise be bounded to fail.
LEVELS OF CULTURE
For analysis purposes, culture presents itself on different levels. This also arise the question from what level to start to analyse organisational culture. At the highest level is the culture ofa national or regional society. in spite of the objections against over re-emphasised generalisations of cultural characteristics, assumptions of nation-al cultures, artefacts, norms and vnation-alues is of high vnation-alue if considered having a pat-tern around an average. The way in which work related assumptions are expressed within a specific organisation is described as organisational or corporate culture. Finally we can talk about the cultures of particular functions within organisations: marketing, production, personnel which is professional culture and the cultures of teams or informal groups or even individual cultures. So differences are observed not only among different nations but at several levels of what we call cultural structure (Figure 2). Among these structural levels national cultures plays a dominating role as it is deeply rooted in other levels and provides a work force with value orientations, expectation about relationships, and interpretations of work. On the other hand as the cultural structure infers people within an organisation do not all have identical sets of artefacts, norms, values and assumptions. There may be a wide spread of these in an organisation.
Tülay Bozkurt
Figııre 2. The levels of cııltııre
ANALYSIS AND POSITIONING OF CULTURE
The complexity of culture together with its soft and fuzzy nature have created
a certain degree of uncertainty and therefore avoidance among most managers. The
objective of this paper is to propose a down-to earth and easy to understand approach to
the analysis and positioning of culture. The hypothesis proposed in this paper is that:-Culture can be analysed and modelled using a systems footprint approach which will illustrate the cultural position of an organisation across the hierarchical levels of culture.
Figure 3 illustrates en example of a footprint for Cultural Assumptions using Hofstede's (1985) dimensions for assumptions.
Attitudcs to thc Environmcnt: Intcrnal v. Extcrnal Univcrsalism v. Particularism lndividualism
Attitudc to time: Ncutral
Lincar v. Circular-+-.--+---+---+--llf--+--+---+--+--ı-- or v. Human Oricntation Achicvcmcnt v. Ascription Emotional Diffuse
Prof Dı'. isnıail Özaslan 'a Armağan
The hypothesis assumes that the footprint modelling technique shown in Figure 3 can be applied across all levels of culture, thus creating several cultural foot-prints, one corresponding to each level of culture as illustrated in Figure 2. Then by simply overlaying these footprints one could develop a picture of cultural overlaps, gaps and conflicts inherent within an organisation.
THE ROLE OF CULTURAL MODELLING iN MANAGEMENT OF CHANGE
lt is important that a company identifies possible conflicts and gaps between
the culture within the organisation and the strategy the company wants to adopt before it embarks on the process of change. The footprint tool put forward in this paper can help companies to do this. The tool can be used in a number of "change" situations, for example, managing a programme of change in an existing organisa-tion. By way of illustration, a company who recognises that the present culture with-in a department is one with-in which people favour workwith-ing autonomously on predefwith-ined tasks, would realise that if it wished to follow a strategy which involved innovation and team working, there would be conflict between the present culture and the strat-egy they planned to pursue. On recognising the gap the company would then be able to make an informed decision as to how to deal with this conflict.
Similarly, cultural modelling techniques could be used to help companies with location, management buyout and take-over decisions.
CONCLUSIONS
This article started by highlighting the importance of aligning culture to busi-ness strategy and has presented evidence from the literature to illustrate this point. The article went on to suggest that in order to be able to align culture with strategy, it is important first to be able to identify and model culture at different levels. This paper has put forward a "footprint" method of modelling culture. It is hoped that this will provide managers, involved in any form of change management activity, with a tool which will assist them in modelling culture. Thus managers will be better placed to identify gaps, overlaps and conflicts which may affect the successful implementa-tion of change.
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