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Chapter 5 cultural web
The Cultural Web
• Organisational culture consists of the
beliefs, attitudes, practices and customs to
which people are exposed during their
interaction with the organisation.
• Cultural web means a combination of
the assumptions that make up the
paradigm, together with the physical
manifestations of culture.
• Whether you can define it or not, culture
exists.
• Culture often becomes the focus of
attention during periods of organizational
change – when companies merge and
their cultures clash. In more static
environments, cultural issues may be
responsible for low morale, absenteeism
or high staff turnover, with all of the
adverse effects those can have on
productivity.
• Aligning your organization's culture with
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strategy. corporate culture can have a huge
impact on an organization's work environment and
output.
The Cultural Web, developed by Gerry Johnson and
Kevan Scholes in 1992, provides one such approach
for looking at and changing your organization's
culture. Using it, you can expose cultural
assumptions and practices, and set to work aligning
organizational elements with one another, and with
your strategy.
Influencing factors:
• The organizational founder
• The organizational history
• Leadership and management style
• Structure and systems
The cultural web
Analyzing clues:
•
•
By analyzing the factors in each, you can
begin to see the bigger picture of your culture:
what is working, what isn't working, and
what needs to be changed.
We use the Cultural Web firstly to look at
organizational culture as it is now, secondly to
look at how we want the culture to be, and
thirdly to identify the differences between the
two. These differences are the changes we
need to make to achieve the high-performance
culture that we want.
Stories:
• The past events and people talked about
inside and outside the company. Who and
what the company chooses to immortalize
says a great deal about what it values,
and perceives as great behavior.
• Stories are used by members of the
organisation to tell people what is
important in the organisation.
Rituals and Routines
＊The daily behavior and actions of people that
signal acceptable behavior. This determines
what is expected to happen in given situations,
and what is valued by management.
＊The routines and rituals are the way
members of the organisation go about their
daily work and the special events or particular
activities that reinforce the “ way we do things
around here”.
Symbols:
• The visual representations of the company
including logos, how plush the offices are,
and the formal or informal dress codes.
• 例如：The head of collection section is an
important position and enjoys privilege,
including a large office, a special section
heads’ dining room and a dedicated
personal assistant.
Organizational structure:
• This includes both the structure defined by
the organization chart, and the unwritten
lines of power and influence that indicate
whose contributions are most valued.
• The organisational structure is likely to
reflect and reinforce the power structure.
Control system:
• The ways that the organization is controlled.
•
These include financial systems, quality systems,
and rewards (including the way they are
measured and distributed within the
organization.)
The controls of the organisation relate to the
measurements and reward systems which
emphasise what is important to the organisation.
Power structures:
• The pockets of real power in the company. This
•
may involve one or two key senior executives, a
whole group of executives, or even a
department. The key is that these people have
the greatest amount of influence on decisions,
operations, and strategic direction.
Power can be seen as the ability of certain
groups to persuade or coerce others to follow a
certain course of action.
Paradigm:
• 通常指分析的某个具体组织，如national
museum(Dec.08)，指该组织的典型特征，
如exists for the good of the nation, funded
by government, guardians of the
continuity of nation’s heritage and culture,
what constitutes heritage and culture is
determined by experts
• Six factors overlap,reinforce each other.
Using the cultural web:
• 1. Analyzing Culture As It Is
Now(p139)
As these questions are answered, we start
to build up a picture of what is influencing
your corporate culture. It includes:
• The organizational founder
• The organizational history
• Leadership and management style
• Structure and systems
• Now we need to look at the web as a
whole and make some generalized
statements regarding the overall culture.
These statements about your corporate
culture should:
• Describe the culture;
• Identify the factors that are prevalent
throughout the web.
• 2. Analyzing Culture as You Want it
to Be:
With the picture of your current cultural
web complete, now's the time to repeat
the process, thinking about the culture
that you want.
Starting from your organization's strategy,
think about how you want the
organization's culture to look, if everything
were to be correctly aligned, and if you
were to have the ideal corporate culture.
• 3. Mapping the Differences Between the
Two
Now compare your two Cultural Web diagrams,
and identify the differences between the two.
Considering the organization's strategic aims and
objectives:
(1)What cultural strengths have been highlighted
by your analysis of the current culture?
(2)What factors are hindering your strategy or are
misaligned with one another?
(3)What factors are detrimental to the health and
productivity of your workplace?
(4)What factors will you encourage and reinforce?
(5)Which factors do you need to change?
(6)What new beliefs and behaviors do you need to
promote?
• 4. Prioritize Changes, and Develop a Plan
to Address Them
• Implementing cultural changes is not simple: it
•
involves renewal values, beliefs and behavior,
and it's a major challenge, taking a great deal of
time and hard work from everyone involved.
To create a cultural environment that
encourages success, supports the organization's
objectives and, all-in-all, makes for a better
place to work.
Culture classification:
• Power culture
• Role culture
• Task culture
• Person culture
Power culture:
• All or nearly all power is concentrated in
the hands of one person.
• Small organizations, perhaps family.
• Current corporate governance rules
suggest that the Chief Executive Officer
and the Chairman should be different
people so the power at the top is spread.
Role culture:
• As organizations grow, role cultures become
more common. Role cultures are essentially
bureaucracies. There tends to be great task
specialization, many layers and titles, great
formality. In stable environments, this can be an
inefficient organizational culture, but it tends to
be rather slow to adapt to change. Furthermore,
employees think that their role and job title is
more important than the work they actually do.
Task culture:
• This is a more modern type of culture.
Here employees do not concentrate so
much on their role or title. Instead they
concentrate on getting the task done and
achieving organizational success. They will
tend to highly motivated, flexible,
adaptable and eager to learn.
Person culture:
• This isn’t of great importance in most
organizations. It refers to an organization
where the people are really pursuing their
own particular ambitions. They may have
to be in a particular organization to fulfill
that, but they are not really interested in
the organization so much as doing what
they want.
• For example, a talented surgeon may be
done in a hospital is to make use of the
infrastructure, but what they really like
dong is operating and curing people. Their
interaction with the organization is kept at
a minimum.