Behavior Management and Organizational Behavior

¶ … Behavior

Management and Organizational Behavior -- the Organizational Culture

The organizational culture is an emblem of each economic agent and it directly impacts the company's chances of succeeding. The organizational culture impacts the firm at each level and is felt -- in one way or another -- by each individual employee, as well as by each member of the stakeholder categories -- such as clients, business partners, the general public, governmental institutions, not-for-profit agencies and so on.

The specialized literature presents the manager and the general reader with a wide array of models of organizational behavior, but fact remains that the leader cannot implement a model from the textbook and expect it to work. And this is even more so applicable in a context in which some books, such as Corporate Cultures: The Rites and Rituals of Corporate Life, do not present the reader with models, but with concepts of organizational culture and issues to be taken into consideration in the construction and assessment of an organizational culture. Author Allan a. Kennedy: "Our original purpose in writing the book was to get the subject of culture on the management agenda and to sensitize managers to its importance" (Richman, 1999).

The manager will as such have to devise his own model of organizational culture, based on the specifics of the entity he represents. In this order of ideas, the executive team at TUIU has also made its decision of implementing a Denison culture model based on the higher level of correspondence between model features and organizational requirements.

The executive team at TUIU initially looked at three models, as follows:

The Deal and Kennedy's Cultural Model

The Competing Values Framework, and the Denison Model.

Each of these models is characterized by its own features, which make it applicable within specific organizational contexts. The lines below present the main features of these three models. Also, the differences which are observed indicate why TUIU has chosen the Denison model.

The Deal and Kennedy Model of organizational culture is centered on the identification of four different "types of organization, based on how quickly they receive feedback and reward after they have done something and the level of risks that they take" (Changing Minds). These four cultures are:

Work hard and play hard culture, in which the reward and feedback are quick, and the risk is low

Tough-guy macho culture, in which the feedback and rewards are quick, and the risk is high

The process culture in which the feedback and reward are slow and the risk is low, and finally

The bet-the-company culture, in which the rewards and feedbacks are slow and the risk is high.

The Competing Values Framework defines the model of organizational culture from the lenses of the focus on culture (namely internal focus and external focus) and those of the source of decision, namely the role of the employees vs. The management in the making / influencing of a decision. In accordance to these criteria, the Competing Values Framework identifies four categories of organizational cultures:

Hierarchy, in which a strict chain of command is implemented

Market, in which control is sought, but emphasis is placed on customers

Clan, in which greater emphasis is placed on flexibility, rather than control, and fourth

Adhocracy, in which emphasis is placed on independence and control.

Finally, the Denison Culture Model is less structural and less focused on the creation and identification of specific types of culture. It is in fact constructed on a quarter of a century of research and its focus is that of aligning the organizational culture to the organizational features and goals. The Denison Culture Model is based "on the link between organizational culture and bottom-line performance measures such as return on investment, sales growth, quality, innovation and employee satisfaction" (Denison Consulting).

Unlike the previous two models which create several culture categories, the Denison Model creates two surveys which are used to ensure an alignment between organizational values, features and objectives and the organizational culture. These two surveys are:

The organizational culture survey, and the leadership development survey.

Their scope is that of correlating leadership and culture at four distinct dimensions -- mission, adaptability, involvement and consistency. The analysis goes even further to test the four dimensions, at the level of three additional features per dimension, as follows:

Mission: strategic direction and intent, goals and objectives, and vision.

Adaptability: creation of change, focus on customer, organizational learning.