It’s been over a year since I’ve touched this blog but I had to recent write a book report for grad school and couldn’t find any summaries so I figured I’d post the one I made.
Section 1 Positioning Organizational Culture
This section establishes various concepts based on organization, culture, and communication. Organizations are central to our society unless someone goes throw life as a constant solo; everyone will, at some point, be a member of organizational cultures. One common factor to all contemporary views on organizational culture is the role of communication in its creation.
A person’s communicative role as an organizational member is central to both the emergent nature of the organization and its culture. This can contribute to the creation, maintenance, or development of these organizational cultures by communicating with other organizational members, even all three at once. Due to the complexity of organizational culture, scholars use multiple methodological and theoretical lenses to clarify that complexity. Often revealing organizational cultures for what they are rather than for what managers and bosses desire them to be. Organizational cultures scholars range form several fields education, anthropology, communication, management sociology, and psychology. Scholars focus on the methods in which cultures are developed, maintained, or changed in order to identify their unique frames or scripts. Then managers can somewhat credibly use them to bridge the different assumptions had by all the team members.
An organization is an active system of administrative members, influenced by outside participants, who communicate inside and around organizational structures in a decisive and arranged manner to complete a superior project.The organization literally cannot exist without communication, as the people in any organization need to convey information to each other in some way at some point.When organizational members create, maintain, and change themselves through talk, it is called organizational communication. This definition is based around the assumption that all organizational members participate in this process and create their unique messages through, but not all meanings will be shared, and not everyone participates.
Culture is defined as the complex set of messages and meanings by which people choose what subsequent messages and behaviors will and will not be interpreted. Culture is both a product and process distinguishing individuals in one collective or team from people in another group or unit. The three classifications of cultural elements that comprise the organizational culture symbol patterns are Artifacts, Values, and Assumptions. Artifacts are the norms, standards, and customs; anything someone can hear, feel, or see in the organizational experience. Artifacts are usually the first things people observe in an organization when they enter it. Values are broad inclinations to prefer a specific state of affairs and have both direction and intensity. Values are not always easy to identify, sometimes ranging from established and written rules to word of mouth secrets to everyone. Assumptions are behaviors and opinions based on how people think, feel, perceive, and act. They are not always correct, but unless proved different via conversation and action, assumptions will be challenging to alter. Together, these three reflect organizational culture, influence actions by generating internalized norms and values, enable group members to discuss their unique experiences, and integrate symbols and meanings specific to their organization and work.
Section 2 Unpacking Organizational Culture
There are five core characteristics of organizational culture. Organizational culture is:
- eternally connected to organizational members
- dynamic and ever-changing.
- Comprised of vying values and assumptions.
- often emotionally charged
- effect all aspects of an organization exclude both foreground and background.
The process of all these characteristics interacting and product of those interactions is how organizational members can simultaneously create and respond to the symbolic and social reality of the organization’s culture. Thus, organizational culture is communicatively constructed by all organizational members. The interacting process and the product of the interactions can morph and change a group culture. When this happens, new practices emerge, become patterned, and are accepted as part of the culture. Specifically, when employees leave and join the organizational system and when the organization acknowledge and adapts to new threats and opportunities from the environment, the group exists in. Organizational Environments often have their social context use to make sense of the group’s communication by the group.
Organizational cultures can be structured as a consensus or divided into subcultures thru a process called sensemaking. Subcultures are the length that different sets of artifacts, values, and assumptions develop and exist within an organization’s whole culture. They appear briefly but with boundaries that are penetrable and inconsistent. Sensemaking while often shows that organizational members have numerous identities that overlap, thus making it challenging to create an organization-wide consensus.
When exploring subculture, three perspectives are used:
All three perspectives—integration, differentiation, and fragmentation— are needed in the research of organizational culture. As using all three perspectives allows obscurity, harmony, and regularity to be shown. This helps avoid the potential blind spots of each perspective when used alone because some cultural elements are neither understood by all or unique to one. No perspective is more correct than another; each perspective offers an incomplete view of an organization’s culture; thus, to gain a multifocal revelation of organizational culture, all three perspectives are required.
Section 3 Lenses for Understanding Organizational Culture
Communication in an organization is partisan, ubiquitous, and complicated because creating organizational culture is unorderly with a complex communication system. Scholars have used a variety of ways to identify and investigate organizational cultures.The symbolic performance perspective acknowledges that a system of symbols—including every day and the unique—is responsible for creating complexity, and sometimes contradictions, in the totality of organizational communication and the organization’s resulting culture.
Organizational culture, as narrative reproduction, explores stories as artifacts to comprehend an organization’s norms, beliefs, and values. This view of organizational culture obtains to research the way that communication creates culture. From the storyteller’s perspective, certain parts of the story are cultural elements relevant only to the individual.
Organizational culture, as textual reproductions, researches the written words of an organization. Formal documentation most frequently represents the managerial and espoused view & the informal texts will show representations of the enacted culture.
Organizational culture is developed and directed thought the perspective of managers is seen as inflexible and regarded as a tool or resource:
- Improving operating efficiencies
- Enhancing the bottom line
- Creating satisfied customers
A managerial perspective views organizational culture as both a screening device and a control device in selecting and maintaining employees for organizational success or a competitive marketplace advantage.
The critical perspective views the communication of a group as an index of its culture or ideology. Critical studies examine how organizational members resist domination and other forms of corporate control in the organization’s culture. In organizations, Politics and Power come about in multiple different ways. A managerial perspective highlights those conflicts in the team culture from a Critical perspective as well as a functional and structural viewpoint. When employees adopt management’s understanding of objectives and values to support the organization’s mission, it is known as Concretive Control. Organizational cultures, while often replicate societal structures and concepts as organizations are often constructed on the values of the masculine gender and Caucasian race. So, this form of organizational culture research from gendered and racial viewpoints can demonstrate if organizational power can result in harassment and discrimination.
Along with societal views, external forces such as Globalization and Technology will influence organizational cultures. Technology structures the group members’ work activities, relationships, and roles. This comes at the expense that technology is almost always seen as a universal group improvement regardless of how different employees might use or view it, such as Electronic Monitoring.
Globalization influenced organizations when they grow beyond their national borders:
- Enter global markets
- Working with foreign subsidiaries
- Creating international alliances
- Engaging in international joint ventures.
These new organizational environments will lead to an intersection of Diverse cultural, social, and communicative practices, which raises new concerns for the suitability of what might have been a conflict clash and traditional junction.
Section 4 Developing, Managing and Changing Organizational Culture
In this book, the view of organizational culture is created, maintained, and changed via the communication of all organizational members in the workplace. Unfortunately, leaders, managers, and executives have a superior influence on organizations and their cultures. Everyone at some point in their lives will find themselves either given the opportunity to develop the culture for or charged with the responsibility over their organization. Managers are interested in creating a culture that promotes their views of organizational effectiveness and maintaining such a culture when it is established. Taking a logical approach to one’s organizational culture will show several factors and strategies that will affect how you can influence cultural formation and change.
Cultural Change: a structural aspect of the organization is processed into three corresponding forms, Evolutionary, Revolutionary and Everyday reframing.
A vision creates a realistic long-term path for any organization. Founders often begin with a statement or idea that describes the importance of their goal. The organization’s mission— a strategic plan that details in the short term of an organization’s future and are central to how an organization operates. Visions are not permanent; Organizations will regularly revisit these cultural manifestations to fine-tune their organizational mission to their ever-changing environment.
The process by which new employees are integrated into an organization’s culture is known as Assimilating or Socializing. These processes are time-consuming, and it can take a year of learning about the organization before it is complete. However, once it is complete, employees are likely to be more satisfied and identify with their jobs and less likely to leave an organization.
A common myth of the primary job of organizational leaders is that they must create and manage work culture; however, leading an organization through the view of organizational culture is a reframing of leadership itself. Under a cultural lens, leadership is a complex social process that should be emergent, reflective, and organic. Asking questions such as, “What social impact am I having on my organization?” and, “What can I do to have a different or more positive impact?” Appose to the binary portrayal of leaders acting and subordinates reacting.
Leaders can invoke and influence cultural changes by:
- Communicating what is essential in employee interacting with employees
- Promote framing conditions to augment the likelihood that certian ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving develop
- Embracing new values and assumptions
- Listening and watching for their resistance to cultural change
- Listening to employee comments about the new cultural elements
- Be aware of their organization’s cultures
- By communicating what is critical, Leaders can influence the organization’s culture.
Personal and Professional ethics can conflict with Organizational culture by facilitating and undermining ethical decision making and behaviors. In the most fortunate situations, the values of our organizations will find our ethics to be socially responsible, similar, and supportable. Cultural elements can lead to unethical behavior, but the strategy for preventing this is based around the ultimate question: Can organizational culture be managed, and is this the way to do it? The answer is often a resounding, maybe, which is not what organizational leaders, managers, and executives wish to hear. Managers, executives, and leaders often aspire to forge an agreeable organizational culture to makes their organizations easier to manageable, but such a unitary culture is unlikely to develop.
The Wannabe Writer 