Organization’s culture plays a major role in the implementation of any policy or analysis method. Every organization has its culture that defines how operations within take place. These are the values, norms, traditions, and how people relate in order to make things work (Schein, 2010).
Successful managers carefully consider such issues before implementing any policy in an organization. It should also be noted that any organization with a history has already developed a culture that it subscribes to. Failure of putting this into consideration in the process of leading an organization is normally detrimental.
Schein (2010) points out that assumptions that have been tested in the past, have been found to be effective form the basis of that organizations culture. This is what should define leadership. Successful leadership makes policies depending on the organization’s culture.
This is the only way the entire organization owns what is being implemented. Such organizations are rated as top performers because the workforce identifies with what is being implemented. Many managers have failed to provide good leadership failing to acknowledge this fact (Handy, 1976).
The newly appointed managers have in most of the time failed this test. It is necessary that any new person in the organization takes time to understand the culture of the place. Learning how things operate in the new station should be the first thing to do. Unfortunately, many new managers come into an organization with preconceived ways of working. What works in one organization may not work in another. Every organization has realities of how they successfully operate.
Impediments to Understanding Organization’s Culture
Morgan (2006) points out that the greatest obstacle to learning culture is considering organizations as images or metaphors. These are preconceived methods that most of the time fail to deliver in most organizations. Failure of adapting the flexibility, a situation demands have always led to the authoritarian leadership. This, in most cases, is the cause of low productivity in most organizations.
There was a change of management in our organization few years ago. The new manager was a person who believed that an organization was like a machine.
He never took time to understand our work culture. We were a fast growing organization that embraced dynamism. A culture of innovation was already inculcated in the workforce. Therefore, coming up with new ideas of working was always a welcome thing by the management. We had shorter working shifts to ensure that we were more productive. Our products were rated highly in the market due to the high quality.
Our new manager never had time to study the situation in our company. He was a person who believed in the systems that were fixed. He believed in planning, organizing and controlling (Morgan, 2006). He could go to great lengths of ensuring that what he wanted was achieved.
He, therefore, appointed and authorized supervisors to be vigilant on their duties of ensuring organization’s success. This scenario created a lot of tension within the workforce. Most of us complained that the management was too fixed on how things worked. We were no longer working with ease like we used to do in the past.
We had earlier gotten used to the culture that taught us to be responsible in our workstations. Every one of us knew what was expected. To ensure that quality was maintained and production was high, we had large highly skilled employees. As mentioned above, this was also to ensure that working shifts were reduced to ensure that we were never tired at work. This had been the situation for five years that I had worked in this company.
To earn more net revenue, there was need to cut cost of production, the new manager decided to make a number of changes in the company.
To achieve this, he opted to push for the retrenchment of almost half of the employees. After the implementation of this plan, those of us who were lucky to have been retained had a difficult working time. Working shifts drastically changed with each of us working more hours than is required. We were sometimes forced to work overtime when production target was not achieved (Ravasi & Schultz, 2006).
In effect, we had become a bunch of tired employees who could not keep up with our work. Quality of our products drastically fell. There was also a nose drive decrease in our production capacity. The powerful and authoritative supervisors he had appointed to control us could not deliver the targeted production.
This was a concern to all the stakeholders and a market research was ordered on our products. The findings showed that our company had lost a lot on the market share. Our products were no longer appealing to the consumers, something that led to our competitors’ products being preferred than ours (Zhang, 2009)..
Consequences of not understanding Organization’s Culture
The above case clearly shows its importance to understand the culture of any new organization. Apparently, it was discovered that he tried to implement what had been happening in his previous company. He never realized that this company was a totally different one, in terms of the structure and production.
We had already established a working environment that had proved to be effectively. Just as Morgan (2006) notes, he was one of those managers who believes that an organization is like a machine. This is a way on thinking that could never work in our organization.
This was a fixed way of approaching management that eventually led to us working as if we were slaves. Whereas our products varied depending on the market demand, he never allowed us to freely deal with this. Instead, he established strict ways of operations that hindered the employees from freely exploring there areas of interests. Retrenchment of the workers led to the overloading of the remaining ones; something that led to the compromise of our products’ quality.
To conclude, I learnt a lot from this experience. Just as Schein (2010) indicates, there exists a difference between reality and truth. The new manager never knew that the truth he knew about managing a company could not, in reality, work in our company. He should have learned how operations take place in this new station.
Any decisions to be taken could have been done depending on the trend already in place. What he implemented in this company could have earlier on worked for his former company. His belief on the previous work experience totally failed. If he took time and understood our operations, he could made decisions accordingly to the good of the company.
References
Handy, C. B. (1976) Understanding Organizations. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Morgan, G. (2006). Images of Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Ravasi, D., Schultz, M. (2006). “Responding to organizational identity threats: exploring the role of organizational culture.” Academy of Management Journal, 49 (3): 433-458.
Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational Culture and Leadership. 4th ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers.
Zhang, X. (2009). Values, Expectations, Ad Hoc Rules, and Culture Emergence in International Cross Cultural Management Contexts. New York: Nova Science Publishers.