How Organizations Sustain Culture

Ever wonder how an organization retains its culture even though key employees come and go over the years? Even though there is constant change to the organization?  Glenn Carroll and J. Richard Harrison, authors of Culture and Demography in Organizations have come up with a mathematical model to illustrate how culture is transmitted in a social aggregate.  They believe that organization culture is really static. Their model is based on three components: hiring, socialization and turnover.

In the ever changing business world it is hard for an organization to have a specific culture.  Afterall an organization is made up of employees who have different backgrounds, languages, cultures, norms, beliefs and mindsets.  All of these differences have to somehow mend together to make up the culture of a specific organization- a tough task.

The authors do not recommend establishing a clearly defined culture within a company.  What is key however is to have an alignment between cultural content and set management preferences.  They suggest incorporating cultural selectivity into the recruitment efforts and increasing social efforts. They also suggest letting go of employees who do not conform to the corporate culture- a theory which sounds pretty harsh.  But the goal is to have a homogeneous and aligned culture which has employees who can self manage themselves. It is their belief that once employees have internalized the practices management wants they can work with minimal supervision.

How does organizations get the benefits of this model?  They need to develop methods to measure the job candidates cultural compatibility. Based on their research it seems that organizations who have strong corporate cultures are very selective in their recruitment efforts.  Candidates are usually interviewed by five or more executives.

The most interesting part of the research is when Carroll and Harrison apply their model to defeating terror organizations.  American Department of Defense officials called the researchers for their expertise. A terrorist group survives by having a solid culture.  Understanding how these groups sustain their culture led the researchers to come up with a model to erode the groups. The common belief is that if you kill the leader of a terrorist group-,the group will also die.  According to the researchers that theory is flawed.  Killing the leader has no impact on the strength of the group.  What works is increasingly neutralizing terrorist cell members over a long period of time.  This weakens the group.  Also, the researchers state delaying the admission of a new member is a good way of destabilizing the organization.

Comments

[Tiffany Monhollon]

Hey! It's great to see others interested in the topic of corporate culture and how it operates. I'm in the process of writing my thesis on corporate culture, based off the theory of social capital. It's a case study, so it's really a ground-level view of how things operate.

I really enjoyed your post. You have some great things to say, so keep up the good work!