Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th Edition

Part FourASSESSING CULTURE ANDLEADING PLANNED CHANGE

What I have tried to provide thus far is a descriptive analysis of what culture is, how it works, and how to think about and understand it. When and how you would assess the culture would depend entirely on your reasons. For example, you might want to assess the culture of an organization that has offered you a job, and you wonder whether or not you would fit in there. You might be a leader who is considering acquiring another company and might want to know how your culture and the new company’s culture might mesh. You might be a manager who is trying to reduce conflict between two departments under you and wonder about the cultures of those two departments. You might be a human resources executive who has been asked by your CEO whether employees are engaged enough in their jobs; he also wants you to “create a culture of engagement.” Or you might be a hospital executive who is worried about too many wrongful deaths or high rates of infection and has heard about the concept of “safety culture” in high-hazard industries.

My point is that each of these and many other possible reasons for assessing a culture might lead to different diagnostic and change processes, using different kinds of tools and models of change. What we will do in this part of the book is to provide as best we can some of the generic issues of assessment and change and describe the kinds of cultural assessment tools and change processes that are most appropriate ...