March 20,2001
Written by: Luis Lozada
Vielba, Carol A. (1995) "Teaching Managers About Culture," Journal of European Industrial Training, Volume 19, Issue 1.
What do managers know about Organizational Culture? Where and/or how can they learn about this topic?
It is a fact that mangers need a deep understanding about Organizational Culture in order to do their job as expected, but this understanding has to come from somewhere else than their common sense. They are also required to understand and analyze the underlying values of their own organization and how these values are related to the social process of the company.
In this article, a group of UK managers enrolled in an MBA program were asked about concepts related to Organizational Culture. According to this study, managers lack the appropriate academic way. This study also found that mangers find discussing aspects of their own Organizational Culture difficult.
When asked to identify organization's underlying values, about 66% of the respondents answered aspects of the organization's structure. Some of the organizational features cites as underlying values were:
- Recruitment Practices
- Organizational Structure
- Company Image
- Control Systems
- Employee Profile
- Reward Systems
- Management Style
This suggests that most managers don't have a very clear understanding when identifying the organization's values, which shows unfamiliarity with these topics.
In the same order, this study shows that the subjects most likely to contribute to a familiarity with the concepts and models used in a cultural analysis of organizations are those to which managers have been the least exposed. It is not surprising, then, that most managers are not familiarized and not well equipped to handle the subject.
Another reason that most managers find cultural subjects difficult to handle could be the fear to talk and discuss it in the work place. When asked about this, managers revealed that they feel comfortable talking about the strictly business issues, goals and strategy, processes, organization of work, and performance review. On the other hand, when asked about the topics they don't feel comfortable discussing those are that they feel are taboo topics, they answered that in general there is discomfort with issues which point to problems or poor performance; those which are critical, personal or to do with money; and those which raise questions about the standards of behavior or challenge established power and practices.
Now, is a MBA program a good way to equip managers to understand and work with cultural concepts in the organization? Based on the results from this study, the core courses of the program, those related with organizational behavior and organizational development, have been effective in helping the students in handling cultural concepts. But questions about how to break through the taboos and discomfort when looking a their organizational culture is not taught in these kinds of programs.
