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5/3/2012

Submitted by Aayush Narsaria (65172 FSB 1)

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Insights and Dilemmas

To make sense of certain situations requires taking a cultural perspective; learning to see the world through cultural lenses; becoming competent in cultural analysis by being able to perceive and decipher the cultural forces that operate in groups, organizations, and occupations. If we understand the dynamics of culture, we will be less likely to be puzzled, irritated, and anxious when we encounter the unfamiliar and seemingly irrational behavior of people in organizations, and we will have a deeper understanding not only of why various groups of people or organizations can be so different, but also why it is so hard to change them. If we understand culture better we will better understand ourselves, better understand the forces acting within us that dene who we are, that reect the groups with which we identify and to which we want to belong. Leadership creates and changes cultures, while management and administration act within a culture. Any social unit that has some kind of shared history will have evolved a culture, with the strength of that culture dependent on the length of its existence, the stability of the groups membership, and the emotional intensity of the actual historical experiences they have shared. The culture of a group can be dened as a pattern of shared basic assumptions that was learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and, therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. All group and organizational theories distinguish two major sets of problems that all groups, no matter what their size, must deal with: (1) survival, growth, and adaptation in their environment; and (2) internal integration that permits daily functioning and the ability to adapt and learn. Once a group has a culture, it will pass elements of this culture on to new generations of group members. Culture is a mechanism of social control and can be the basis for explicitly manipulating members into perceiving, thinking, and feeling in certain ways. Not every collection of people develops a culture. To dene culture one must go below the behavioral level, because behavioral regularities can be caused by forces other than culture.

 The bottom line for leaders is that if they do not become conscious of the cultures in which they are embedded, those cultures will manage them. The major levels of cultural analysis are Artifacts, Espoused Beliefs and Values, and Basic Underlying Assumptions. Basic assumptions tend to be taken for granted by group members and are treated as nonnegotiable. Values are open to discussion and people can agree to disagree about them. Though the essence of a groups culture is its pattern of shared, basic taken-forgranted assumptions, the culture will manifest itself at the level of observable artifacts and shared espoused beliefs and values. To understand a groups culture, one must attempt to get at its shared basic assumptions and one must understand the learning process by which such basic assumptions come to be. In analyzing cultures, it is important to recognize that artifacts are easy to observe but difficult to decipher and that espoused beliefs and values may only reect rationalizations or aspirations. It is dangerous to try to infer the deeper assumptions from artifacts alone, because ones interpretations will inevitably be projections of ones own feelings and reactions. Certain values are conrmed only by the shared social experience of a group. Such beliefs and values typically involve the groups internal relations; the test of whether they work or not is how comfortable and anxiety-free members are when they abide by them. The two keys to successful culture change are (1) the management of the large amounts of anxiety that accompany any relearning at this level and (2) the assessment of whether the genetic potential for the new learning is even present. The most central issue for leaders is how to get at the deeper levels of a culture, how to assess the functionality of the assumptions made at that level, and how to deal with the anxiety that is unleashed when those levels are challenged.

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