Chapter 5 cultural web

The Cultural Web Organisational culture consists of the beliefs, attitudes, practices and customs to which people are exposed during their interaction with the organisation. Cultural web means a combination of the assumptions that make up the paradigm, together with the physical manifestations of culture.

Whether you can define it or not, culture exists. Culture often becomes the focus of attention during periods of organizational change – when companies merge and their cultures clash. In more static environments, cultural issues may be responsible for low morale, absenteeism or high staff turnover, with all of the adverse effects those can have on productivity.

Aligning your organization's culture with strategy Aligning your organization's culture with strategy. corporate culture can have a huge impact on an organization's work environment and output. The Cultural Web, developed by Gerry Johnson and Kevan Scholes in 1992, provides one such approach for looking at and changing your organization's culture. Using it, you can expose cultural assumptions and practices, and set to work aligning organizational elements with one another, and with your strategy.

Influencing factors: The organizational founder The organizational history Leadership and management style Structure and systems

The cultural web

Analyzing clues: By analyzing the factors in each, you can begin to see the bigger picture of your culture: what is working, what isn't working, and what needs to be changed. We use the Cultural Web firstly to look at organizational culture as it is now, secondly to look at how we want the culture to be, and thirdly to identify the differences between the two. These differences are the changes we need to make to achieve the high-performance culture that we want.

Stories: The past events and people talked about inside and outside the company. Who and what the company chooses to immortalize says a great deal about what it values, and perceives as great behavior. Stories are used by members of the organisation to tell people what is important in the organisation.

Rituals and Routines ＊The daily behavior and actions of people that signal acceptable behavior. This determines what is expected to happen in given situations, and what is valued by management. ＊The routines and rituals are the way members of the organisation go about their daily work and the special events or particular activities that reinforce the “ way we do things around here”.

Symbols: The visual representations of the company including logos, how plush the offices are, and the formal or informal dress codes. 例如：The head of collection section is an important position and enjoys privilege, including a large office, a special section heads’ dining room and a dedicated personal assistant.

Organizational structure: This includes both the structure defined by the organization chart, and the unwritten lines of power and influence that indicate whose contributions are most valued. The organisational structure is likely to reflect and reinforce the power structure.

Control system: The ways that the organization is controlled. These include financial systems, quality systems, and rewards (including the way they are measured and distributed within the organization.) The controls of the organisation relate to the measurements and reward systems which emphasise what is important to the organisation.

Power structures: The pockets of real power in the company. This may involve one or two key senior executives, a whole group of executives, or even a department. The key is that these people have the greatest amount of influence on decisions, operations, and strategic direction. Power can be seen as the ability of certain groups to persuade or coerce others to follow a certain course of action.

Paradigm: 通常指分析的某个具体组织，如national museum(Dec.08)，指该组织的典型特征，如exists for the good of the nation, funded by government, guardians of the continuity of nation’s heritage and culture, what constitutes heritage and culture is determined by experts Six factors overlap,reinforce each other.

Using the cultural web: 1. Analyzing Culture As It Is Now(p139) As these questions are answered, we start to build up a picture of what is influencing your corporate culture. It includes: The organizational founder The organizational history Leadership and management style Structure and systems

Now we need to look at the web as a whole and make some generalized statements regarding the overall culture. These statements about your corporate culture should: Describe the culture; Identify the factors that are prevalent throughout the web.

2. Analyzing Culture as You Want it to Be: With the picture of your current cultural web complete, now's the time to repeat the process, thinking about the culture that you want. Starting from your organization's strategy, think about how you want the organization's culture to look, if everything were to be correctly aligned, and if you were to have the ideal corporate culture.

3. Mapping the Differences Between the Two Now compare your two Cultural Web diagrams, and identify the differences between the two. Considering the organization's strategic aims and objectives: (1)What cultural strengths have been highlighted by your analysis of the current culture? (2)What factors are hindering your strategy or are misaligned with one another? (3)What factors are detrimental to the health and productivity of your workplace? (4)What factors will you encourage and reinforce? (5)Which factors do you need to change? (6)What new beliefs and behaviors do you need to promote?

4. Prioritize Changes, and Develop a Plan to Address Them Implementing cultural changes is not simple: it involves renewal values, beliefs and behavior, and it's a major challenge, taking a great deal of time and hard work from everyone involved. To create a cultural environment that encourages success, supports the organization's objectives and, all-in-all, makes for a better place to work.

Culture classification: Power culture Role culture Task culture Person culture

Power culture: All or nearly all power is concentrated in the hands of one person. Small organizations, perhaps family. Current corporate governance rules suggest that the Chief Executive Officer and the Chairman should be different people so the power at the top is spread.

Role culture: As organizations grow, role cultures become more common. Role cultures are essentially bureaucracies. There tends to be great task specialization, many layers and titles, great formality. In stable environments, this can be an inefficient organizational culture, but it tends to be rather slow to adapt to change. Furthermore, employees think that their role and job title is more important than the work they actually do.

Task culture: This is a more modern type of culture. Here employees do not concentrate so much on their role or title. Instead they concentrate on getting the task done and achieving organizational success. They will tend to highly motivated, flexible, adaptable and eager to learn.

Person culture: This isn’t of great importance in most organizations. It refers to an organization where the people are really pursuing their own particular ambitions. They may have to be in a particular organization to fulfill that, but they are not really interested in the organization so much as doing what they want.

For example, a talented surgeon may be done in a hospital is to make use of the infrastructure, but what they really like dong is operating and curing people. Their interaction with the organization is kept at a minimum.