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CULTURE DYNAMICS IN THE MATURE COMPANY
Organizational mid-life or maturity creates a series of cultural issues that differ dramatically from the issues of growth and early evolution. As I pointed out in the last chapter, during the growth period the emphasis is on building, evolving, consolidating, stabilizing, and institutionalizing the cultural elements that work. Values and assumptions become embedded in organizational structures and processes. As organizations reach maturity, a wholly different set of issues arise because if change is needed, we are now dealing with unlearning and replacing assumptions and values in a system of highly differentiated subcultures that are likely to be both functional in some parts and dysfunctional in other ...