What is organizational culture?

Organizational culture concerns the deeply rooted beliefs, values, and norms shared by the members of an organization. While these beliefs and values generally are not directly visible, they drive and are reflected in the actions taken by an organization.

Organizational culture is not organizational climate.? Climate refers to the more visible policies, practices, procedures and routines that govern the organization, as well as its behavioral expectations and reward structure.? Climate and culture are interconnected, in that an organization's beliefs and values underlie its particular climate.?

Organizational culture is also not an espoused list of values developed by a group of executives off site.? These are ideals.? What you strive to be as an organization and what you think you endorse may be different than the beliefs and values that are actually being played out.? It is critical that you find out who you really are before you can decide who you want to be.

The purposes and benefits of cultural alignment

Fit of Culture with Strategic Objectives

Why would a company be interested in assessing its culture?? First of all, if an organization is interested in maximizing its ability to attain its strategic objectives, it must understand if its culture supports and drives the actions necessary to achieve its goals.? An in-depth cultural assessment, based on quantitative data and interviews, can enable a company to determine the difference between its current culture and its desired culture.? This information can then be used to design interventions for cultural change.

For example, a company may wish to assess its desired competencies for success and match these against an assessment of its existing culture.? Such a gap analysis can enable a company to develop appropriate interventions ranging from leadership development to large scale system changes to enhance its ability to achieve its strategic objectives.

Mergers and acquisitions: The fit of two cultures

Second, companies are merging with and acquiring each other in unprecedented and growing numbers today.? While it's a sad fact that one out of two marriages end in divorce today, corporate couplings fare even worse.? Of the 340 mergers Mercer Consulting analyzed over the past decade, 57% of acquiring companies produced poor returns in the three years after the deal, compared with others in their industry.

Why do many acquisitions destroy shareholder value rather than create it?? Surprisingly, it has nothing to do with having paid too high a purchase price or a lack of strategic fit.? Rather, those companies which fail to win the support of customers and employees immediately after the merger are those that fare the worst.? Understanding the two organizations' cultures is critical to being able to successfully weave them and their employees together quickly, so that productivity and customer service are uninterrupted.? Just as two individuals with differing values and beliefs will not last long together, so it is also true for organizations.? Thus, many companies include cultural assessment as part of their due diligence process, to discern before they get to the altar if the cultural differences could be managed after a merger.

Fit of new hires with culture

Third, a company may wish to maximize the fit of new hires into its corporate culture.? With corporations, especially in high technology, hiring huge numbers of new employees today at a breakneck pace, it is critical that they be hiring the right fits for their current culture (or the new culture that they want to create).? This is possible only with an in-depth understanding of the current and/or desired culture, as well as an in-depth understanding of the candidate's personality, values and behaviors.? Finding the best fit with the culture is critical to maximizing a candidate's productivity and creativity.

The Hagberg Cultural Alignment Process

Dr. Richard Hagberg, founder of Hagberg Consulting Group (HCG), and Dr. Julie Heifetz, a cultural anthropologist, researched and designed the Hagberg cultural alignment process.? The process includes an objective quantitative survey called the Cultural Assessment Tool(CAT) and in-depth interviews.? Generally, the CAT is first administered to a stratified random sampling of a company's employees.? HCG consultants then conduct individual two hour interviews with a significantly smaller number of employees of the company's choice.

The CAT

The CAT measures your employees' perceptions of 42 aspects of your organization's culture.? These include dimensions such as politics, customer focus, innovation, trust, valuing excellence, diversity and teamwork.? We present normed results to you, so that you can see how your organization's values and beliefs compare to those of other companies.? We also analyze and quantify the degree to which your culture is fragmented or integrated; that is, the degree to which employees agree about what the beliefs and values really are.

Interviews

After the results of the CAT have been analyzed, HCG consultants will conduct in-depth one-on-one interviews to more thoroughly explore key themes surfaced by the CAT and to probe issues which can not be explored using a quantitative questionnaire format.? Sample questions include:

Give me 10 words you would use to describe the organization.

Who really gets ahead in this organization?? What and who is really rewarded around here?

What are some of the war stories or legendary events in the organization's history?

What does the CEO or leader pay the most attention to?? Where does his/her energy get expended and what does she/he reward?

The results of the interviews are then analyzed by HCG consultants and combined with the data collected from the CAT to create a comprehensive and in-depth assessment of your company's culture.? This analysis will include how strong and cohesive your culture is and the sources of your organization's values and beliefs.? These can influence how easily a culture can be changed or incorporated with another culture.

Next Steps

We will help you to make the cultural changes that the cultural assessment indicates are necessary for you to most effectively achieve your strategic objectives and/or integrate a new culture with your own.? We draw on our consultants' expertise in strategic planning, anthropology and psychology to design interventions that achieve your objectives.? Such interventions can include culture and climate change management, development of success competencies that match the desired culture, and/or succession planning and leadership development to enhance the creation of the desired culture and or integration of two different cultures.

Directory