Denison Model
Why TUIU Chose the Denison Culture Model
Corporate culture is a word that has become as much a buzz word as a fact. It describes the way that a culture behaves like an existing ethnic culture and what that means for each business. Learning the culture of a business is as important as understanding the culture of a new area of the world that one plans on seeing. This essay will focus on what is considered to be culture within an organization, why cultures change, how culture can be deliberately reshaped, the different models and why one is more effective in a certain situation than another, and how and the different versions of an organization play into its culture. All of these questions will be related to the change that has taken place at TUIU.
Like any culture it is what binds a group of people together that is considered a culture. People in anthropological cultures share a common language, they share rituals and they share an understanding of the roles that each is supposed to fulfill. Within an organization there is a certain language that outsiders do not know. It is possible to learn the corporate language, but one cannot get the complete dialect unless they are an immersed in the culture. Sometimes someone who is new to the management within an organization will try to change that language for no reason. But, this is usually not possible. The rituals that a company has are sometimes specific to the company, but many times they are similar to the conduct of others. The roles that are practiced by a human culture are usually built upon a hierarchy. The people in the culture know what roles others hold because of title, but they also understand the roles that different people take on that are not official....
There are many roles that people within the organization must fulfill, and that is what most of the models are concerned with. These organizational culture models -- Deal and Kennedy's Cultural Model, The Competing Values Framework, The Denison Model -- all look at the roles that people play within the organization differently.
Deal and Kennedy can be said to have started the new revolution that chose to look at understanding organizational culture as one of the premier management tools that companies can use (Richman, 1999). They believed that culture was something that was specific to an organization because of the people who were involved in forging that culture. Kennedy said, "The culture of any organization is still a reflection of the deeply held values and behaviors of relatively few individuals -- in the case of large companies, those of the CEO and maybe a handful of very senior executives. In the case of small companies, culture may flow from the values held by the founder or CEO alone" (Richman, 1999). Thus, the culture of an organization, according to Deal and Kennedy, can only be changed when the people who have instilled the culture wish it to change. Sometimes these people will realize that the culture that they have developed does not work for their organization. Then they will deliberately change it to better fit what they need. However, this change is not without problems. A large company can have a difficult time changing the culture because there are many different, smaller entities within the company. These different divisions may have an overriding cultural imperative, but a separate group of people probably has a more localized culture specific to the managers and supervisors that are most closely associated with it.…
