Week 10 -- Justin

I found Saba Colakoglu and Jon Littlefield’s Teaching organizational culture using a projective technique: Collage construction (2011) and chose it because it dealt with organizational culture (our readings) and making collages (our group assignment): It seemed perfect.

What I found interesting was Colakoglu and Littlefield’s (2011) three views/metaphors (metaphors and organization takes it back, week 1 maybe – so long ago) of an organization’s culture.  The first that they describe is of thinking of an organization as a country, or as they say “an independent variable that is part of the environment; the second is that organizations are “culture-producing phenomena in which culture results from human enactment and acts as the social or normative glue that holds an organization together; and third, that an organization can be thought of as an “iceberg” – there are many layers and you don’t see most of them (Colakoglu & Littlefield, 2011).

It’s the idea of the iceberg that caught my interest most though.  With organizations you see what they want you to see, Medtronic makes medical devices and that’s what they are known for (Denison & Mishra, 1995). However, it is driven by its “humanistic vision” (Denison & Mishra, 1995).  As a consumer, and also as someone that recently worked in a field that reviewed and opined on medical devices that were made by Medtronic, we never really thought of them as a.) and organization like ours and b.) that they had the same goal in the end – patient care. 

I’m going to stick with Medtronic as my example here because I can see them as their own country (they have a parent company and I don’t think they are as diverse as Philips who make medical devices and consumer electronics).  As a country, Medtronic is probably France while Philips would be the U.S. (all those united states).  And I see Medtronic’s culture in that “humanistic vision” that Denison and Mishra (1995) mention.  In the end, as an organization, as I said before, they want to help people.

That idea is probably what propelled the advancement of the organization originally, and then what brought it back after its bad spell that Denison and Mishra (1995) discuss.  This, I would assume, could be traced back to what Sorensen (2009) writes: “Normative order consisting of basic assumption about what are the ‘right” and ‘wrong’ kinds of behavior.  This mentality promotes the right behavior in the organization and results in the organization operating the same way.  Getting to this though, requires that employees agree upon an organization’s beliefs and mission and that all employees (management too) agree upon goals, and that working toward these goals is a choice that all employees make (Sorensen, 2009).  This idea, along with a management change in 1985, and reverting back to the “humanistic vision” originally held, allowed Medtronic to grow and succeed, showing that “involvement is a cultural trait that is related to effectiveness” (Denison & Mishra, 1995).

The collage part was totally irrelevant.  I think this reading was for an undergrad class and the students were asked to make a collage about their university representative of organizational culture.  Just a weird coincidence that we are making collages this week too.

References:

Colakoglu, S., & Littlefield, J. (2011). Teaching organizational culture using a projective technique: Collage construction. Journal of Management Education, 35(4), 564-585

Denison, D.R. & Mishra, A.K. (1995) Toward a theory of organizational culture and effectiveness.Organization Science, 6, p. 204-223

Sorenson, J. (2009) Note on Organizational Culture, Harvard Business School, pp. 1-6