Organizational Culture: Present Trends Essay

Organizational culture has been defined as â€Å"the set of shared values and norms that control organizational members’ interactions with each other and with suppliers, customers, and other people outside the organization† (Jones, 2004). Just as an organization’s structure can be used to achieve competitive advantage and promote stakeholder interests, an organization’s culture can be used to increase organizational effectiveness. This is because organizational culture controls the way members make decisions, the way they interpret and manage the organization’s environment, what they do with information, and how they behave. Culture thus affects an organization’s competitive position. As culture is discussed in terms of the values and norms that influence its members’ behavior, it usually determines how members of a firm interpret the environment, bond its members to the organization, and give it a competitive advantage. Recent advances that develop organizational theories that deals with culture in organizations have been instituted. These are developing high performance teams, managing organizational identity and managing diversity. Organizational culture exercises a potent form of control over the interactions of organizational members with each other and with outsiders. By supplying people with a toolbox of values, norms, and rules that tell them how to behave, organizational culture is instrumental in determining how they interpret and react to a situation. In developing concepts that enhance organization’s culture would literally translate success and competitive advantage in organizations. High Performance Teams  When working with a group or a company, one should be a team player in order for your tasks to be accomplished successfully. To quote, â€Å"Someone may be great at his or her job, maybe even the best there ever was. But what counts at work is the organization’s success, not personal success. After all, if your organization fails, it does not matter how great you were; you are just as unemployed as everyone else† (Johnson, Kantner & Kikora, 1990). In the work environment, teams materialize to focus on tasks or solve problems that are beyond the capacity of one individual. With this type of set-up that allow creative and innovative juices to flow through the constant sharing of information, people could appropriate division of labor among the members of the team can lead to more effective, more efficient and less stressful workplace. Their high levels of performance with regards to quantity, quality, and timeliness of work results can contribute to their sense of satisfaction, addressing a psychological and motivational need. With incessant exposure to each other, team members and their superiors could ascertain whether they have a team that can continue working together with synergy or their togetherness poses a detrimental effect on their output and interrelationships. In traditional organizational structures, teams were introduced and experimented on to see what works and what does not. While employees have already formed their own social groups for their personal interaction with other employees, management devised ways to re-group them and build teams that would be more productive for the organization. The old hierarchies were replaced with cross-functional structures that were both flat and self-directed. The emergence of the concept of High Performance Teams evolved. To date, organizations and businesses have shifted to this kind of paradigm. They are depicted as flexible but difficult to put together, expensive but worth every cent. To build a high performance team requires a lot of work, time, effort and money. The team leader can serve to be the conduit between the team and the management or other external organizations. Coordination of the team’s activities is also the responsibility of the team leader. Any team leader should be able to ensure that the team maintains the ethical standards of the organization. What’s important is for team members to be consistently coached by management or external agencies hired by management to continually trust, respect and support each other and the organization. Coaching coupled with their guidelines will keep in check their members’ behavior and enhance their decision making skills. Empowerment is a key for the advancement of these skills. To be empowered, the team needs to have information and resources. It also needs the management’s trust that they won’t abuse the information or the resources they are given, which is often curtailed by the guidelines they have set for themselves. This empowerment leads them to become cross-functional. They are then given a wider perspective of the processes and a detailed coverage of the activities that occur and address what needs improvement in the organization. In developing work environments, more corporations are now staunch in their support for diversity. Dealing with diversity in a way that makes it a strength has come to be known as â€Å"managing† diversity. According to Sharon Nelton: Managing diversity meant, and still means, fostering an environment in which workers of all kinds—men, women, white, disabled, homosexual, straight, elderly—can flourish and, given opportunities to reach their full potential and contribute at the highest level, can give top performance to a company (p. 19). When we refer to â€Å"diversity†, this could mean cultural, demographic, organizational or psychological and encompasses ethnicity, religion, gender, age, personality, values, attitudes, occupations, status, or job tenure. By working together in well-supervised teams that include women and men, young and old, minorities and non-minorities, employees can learn how to realize the full potential of diversity. According to Goetsch & Davis (2004), diversity in teamwork can be promoted by applying the following strategies: †¢ Continually assessing circumstances. Is communication among diverse team members positive? Do bias and stereotyping exist among team members? Do minorities and non-minorities with comparable jobs and qualifications earn comparable wages? Factors that might undermine harmonious teamwork should be anticipated, identified, and handled. Giving team members opportunities to learn. Humans naturally tend to distrust people who are different, whether the differences are attributed to gender, culture, age, race, or any other factor. Just working with people who are different can help overcome this unfortunate but natural human tendency. However, it usually takes more than just working together to break down barriers and turn a diverse group of employees into a mutually supportive, complementary team in which the effectiveness of the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. With regards to compensation, there should be an implementation of an appropriate compensation system. In other words, if you want teamwork to work, make it pay. This does not mean that employees are no longer compensated as individuals. Rather, the most successful compensation systems combine both individual and team pay. In Anne Schauber’s study (2001), it found that if a team’s performance is duly rewarded by the organization, a culturally diverse organization â€Å"may be more economical in the long run† and â€Å"will result in better service to a changing clientele†. It enhances the creativity and problem-solving capabilities of the organization† in such a way that the â€Å"previously untapped talent and energy will be focused on achieving organizational goals† (Schauber, 2001). Thus, diversity has become a positive contributing factor to the achievement of the goals of a high performance team. Moreover, De Vries and Manfred (2005) recently used the idea of Zen Buddhism in leadership group coaching to develop high performance teams. De Vries and Manfred (2005) said that Zen Buddhism has as its fundamental purpose the awakening of the mind and the individual attainment of spiritual enlightenment. A Zen teacher is concerned with self-help and helping others with wisdom and compassion. Given this mindset, Zen teachers can be seen as forerunners of leadership coaches. Like Zen teachers, such management coaches provide learning opportunities by giving constructive and balanced feedback. They serve as sparring partners. They help their clients reflect on their own actions. As a way of clarifying and enhancing consciousness, coaching has become the Zen for executives. With executives finally realizing the value of coaching, the coaching market—now a multi-billion-dollar enterprise—is ballooning. Originally carried out by â€Å"one-person bands,† leadership coaching has become a major activity for many large consulting firms. As corporations are constantly seeking methods to improve their own workplace effectiveness and efficiency, individual and group performance had to be measured. Work teams transform to become empowered to make decisions and improve performance; there is also an increased need for accountability. Virtually, all organizations with work teams need a means for measuring their teams’ performance. Indeed, high performance teams coupled with diversity could spell the success of any organization or corporation in our fast changing global environment. Managing Organizational Identity Organizational identity differs, most sharply, from organizational culture because of the prominent role of transference phenomena. The nature of emotional attachments and connectedness, or disconnectedness, is the footing of organizational life and the essence of organizational identity. The centrality of this emotional substructure is especially crucial when there is demand for organizational change and development. Change depends on members’ willingness to assume responsibility for their actions and to depart from the status quo. But this willingness is the result of mutual understanding of shared emotions between superordinates and subordinates, and often among peers in organizations, and is the outcome of their recognition of unconscious expectations and desires. Helping members to become aware of the structure of organizational identity and their place in it is a precondition for freeing them up for organizational change that is strategically sound and productive (Diamond, 1993, p. 7). Ravasi and Schultz (2006) had presented a recent longitudinal study of organizational responses to environmental changes that induce members to question aspects of their organization’s identity. Their findings highlight the role of organizational culture as a source of cues supporting â€Å"sensemaking† action carried out by leaders as they reevaluate their conceptualization of their organization, and as a platform for â€Å"sensegiving† actions aimed at affecting internal perceptions. Ravasi and Schultz (2006) explored organizational responses to environmental changes and shifting external representations that induced members to reflect on their organization’s recent and prospective courses of action and ask themselves, â€Å"What is this organization really about? † Although past research has documented the impact of desired images on organizational responses to environmental changes, they deemed that the influence of organizational culture—and in particular, the influence of its manifestations—on the redefinition of members’ collective self-perceptions. They found organizational culture became the central construct in understanding the evolution of organizational identities in the face of environmental changes, suggesting that collective history, organizational symbols, and consolidated practices provide cues that help members make new sense of what their organization is really about and give that new sense to others. Furthermore, the role of culture in preserving a sense of distinctiveness and continuity as organizational identity is subjected to explicit reevaluation. The findings suggest that the roles external images and organizational culture play in affecting organizational responses to identity threats may be more complementary than the current literature on organizational identity would suggest (Ravasi & Schultz, 2006). Building on evidence from their research, they developed a theoretical framework for understanding how the interplay of construed images and organizational culture shapes changes in institutional claims and shared understandings about the identity of an organization.