The High Performance Organization

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Analysing cultures

A cultural audit can be used to discover the nature of an organization in cultural terms, the way it impacts on the strategy … and the difficulties of changing it.

(Faulkner and Johnson, 1992)

Introduction

A planned, deliberate approach to culture change assumes that managers have a clear understanding of which aspects of culture need to change to produce greater business effectiveness. A culture audit is one of the ways in which managers attempt to identify those aspects of culture they wish to make the target of change efforts.

In this chapter we will look at some of the ways in which organizational cultures can be analysed. Whilst William Bridges (1995) is correct in stating that ‘There ...