Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th Edition

13DECIPHERING CULTURE

Organizational culture can be studied in various ways. The method should be determined by the purpose. Just deciphering a culture for curiosity is as vague an enterprise as just assessing personality or character in an individual. Assessment makes more sense when there is some problem to be illuminated or some specific issue about which we need information. As we will see, how we perform the assessment and what tools we use very much depend on our purpose. If we think about all of the cultural dimensions that have just been reviewed in the previous chapters, we will realize that deciphering a culture to the level of its basic assumptions can be a formidable task. This chapter describes the general issues that are encountered when we try to decipher something as complex as culture.

Why Decipher Culture?

There are several quite different reasons for wanting to decipher or assess an organizational culture. At one extreme is pure academic research where the researcher is trying to present a picture of a culture to fellow researchers and other interested parties to develop a theory or to test some hypothesis. This covers most anthropologists who go to live in a culture to get an insider’s view and then present the culture in written form for others to get a sense of what goes on there (e.g., Dalton, 1959; Kunda, 1992; Van Maanen, 1973).

At the other extreme is the student’s need to assess the culture of an organization to decide whether or not to work there, ...