Relationships among a firm’s functional business activities perhaps can be exemplified best by focusing on organizational culture, an internal phenomenon that permeates all departments and divisions of an organization. Organizational culture can be defined as “a pattern of behavior that has been developed by an organization as it learns to cope with its problem of external adaptation and internal integration, and that has worked well enough to be considered valid and to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel.” This definition emphasizes the importance of matching external with internal factors in making strategic decisions.
Organizational culture captures the subtle, elusive, and largely unconscious forces that shape a workplace. Remarkably resistant to change, culture can represent a major strength or weakness for the firm. It can be an underlying reason for strengths or weaknesses in any of the major business functions.
Defined in Table 4-1, cultural products include values, beliefs, rites, rituals, ceremonies, myths, stories, legends, sagas, language, metaphors, symbols, heroes, and heroines. These products or dimensions are levers that strategists can use to influence and direct strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation activities. An organization’s culture compares to an individual’s personality in the sense that no two organizations have the same culture and no two individuals have the same personality. Both culture and personality are enduring and can be warm, aggressive, friendly, open, innovative, conservative, liberal, harsh, or likable.
At Google, the culture is very informal. Employees are encouraged to wander the halls on employee-sponsored scooters and brainstorm on public whiteboards provided everywhere.
In contrast, the culture at Procter & Gamble (P&G) is so rigid that employees jokingly call themselves “Proctoids.” Despite this difference, the two companies are swapping employees and participating in each other’s staff training sessions. Why? Because P&G spends more money on advertising than any other company and Google desires more of P&G’s $8.7 billion annual advertising expenses; P&G has come to realize that the next generation of laundry- detergent, toilet-paper, and skin-cream customers now spend more time online than watching TV. Consumers age 18 to 27 say they use the Internet nearly 13 hours a week, compared to 10 hours of TV, according to market-data firm Forrester Research.
Dimensions of organizational culture permeate all the functional areas of business. It is something of an art to uncover the basic values and beliefs that are deeply buried in an organization’s rich collection of stories, language, heroes, and rituals, but cultural products can represent both important strengths and weaknesses. Culture is an aspect of an organization that can no longer be taken for granted in performing an internal strategic-management audit because culture and strategy must work together.
Table 4-2 provides some example (possible) aspects of an organization’s culture. Note you could ask employees/managers to rate the degree that the dimension characterizes the firm. When one firm acquires another firm, integrating the two cultures can be important. For example, in Table 4-2, one firm may score mostly 1’s and the other firm may score mostly 5’s, which would present a challenging strategic problem.
The strategic-management process takes place largely within a particular organization’s culture. Lorsch found that executives in successful companies are emotionally committed to the firm’s culture, but he concluded that culture can inhibit strategic management in two basic ways. First, managers frequently miss the significance of changing external conditions because they are blinded by strongly held beliefs. Second, when a particular culture has been effective in the past, the natural response is to stick with it in the future, even during times of major strategic change.8 An organization’s culture must support the collective commitment of its people to a common purpose. It must foster competence and enthusiasm among managers and employees.
Organizational culture significantly affects business decisions and thus must be evaluated during an internal strategic-management audit. If strategies can capitalize on cultural strengths, such as a strong work ethic or highly ethical beliefs, then management often can swiftly and easily implement changes. However, if the firm’s culture is not supportive, strategic changes may be ineffective or even counterproductive. A firm’s culture can become antagonistic to new strategies, with the result being confusion and disorientation.
An organization’s culture should infuse individuals with enthusiasm for implementing
strategies. Allarie and Firsirotu emphasized the need to understand culture:
Culture provides an explanation for the insuperable difficulties a firm encounters when it attempts to shift its strategic direction. Not only has the “right” culture become the essence and foundation of corporate excellence, it is also claimed that success or failure of reforms hinges on management’s sagacity and ability to change the firm’s driving culture in time and in time with required changes in strategies.9
The potential value of organizational culture has not been realized fully in the study of strategic management. Ignoring the effect that culture can have on relationships among the functional areas of business can result in barriers to communication, lack of coordination, and an inability to adapt to changing conditions. Some tension between culture and a firm’s strategy is inevitable, but the tension should be monitored so that it does not reach a point at which relationships are severed and the culture becomes antagonistic. The result- ing disarray among members of the organization would disrupt strategy formulation, implementation, and evaluation. In contrast, a supportive organizational culture can make managing much easier.
Internal strengths and weaknesses associated with a firm’s culture sometimes are overlooked because of the interfunctional nature of this phenomenon. It is important, therefore, for strategists to understand their firm as a sociocultural system. Success is often determined by linkages between a firm’s culture and strategies. The challenge of strategic management today is to bring about the changes in organizational culture and individual mind-sets that are needed to support the formulation, implementation, and evaluation of strategies.