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Instructor Guidelines for Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3d Edition
Edgar H. Schein
Professor Emeritus, MIT
General Guidelines for Instructors
The Book and Its Uses
This book provides material for three key topics that OB courses should cover:
1) Leadership and the various roles of leaders at various stages of group and organizational evolution
2) Group dynamics, covering both the socio-psychological factors of group growth in Chapters 4 and 6, and the strategic, adaptive growth of groups in Chapters 5 and Part III.
3) Cultural dynamics in the initial formation of groups and in the various stages of group growth and organizational maturity and decline.
The book could, therefore, be used as an OB text if the instructor wanted to take a more integrative view rather than just a psychological view which is what most OB texts tend to do. This book deals with sociological and anthropological issues as well and, therefore, gives a more complete picture of how groups, organizations, and leadership really work. Cultural analysis ties leadership, group dynamics, and organizational dynamics together into a coherent frame of reference.
Ideas and Exercises
· The word “culture” is very vague, abstract, and ambiguous. It has many popular meanings. The student must be made aware that the concept is useful only if it is carefully defined and precisely used.
· Any group or organization with any history will have evolved a culture. Help the students to think about their family cultures, their fraternity cultures, and any other group in which they regularly spend time.
· Ask student groups to visit several Banks and see if they feel any difference. Later you will ask them to visit them again with more specific instructions to observe physical layout, dress codes for the clerks, etc.
· Organize the students into several teams and pick one organization in the vicinity to become the target of inquiry. Using the inquiry categories in Chapter 11, assign each team a different method of inquiry and build in period reports back to the class to see what each team has discovered, how the different inquiry methods work, etc.
Chapter-by-Chapter Suggestions
Chapter 1 – The Concept of Organizational Culture: Why Bother?
· Abstract definitions don’t make sense without concrete examples, so the instructor should consider asking students what they make of each of the brief cases as a basis for discussion.
· Notice that the examples and analysis highlight behavior that does not make sense. People continue to do things that seem inappropriate. Ask students to give examples where others they observe are doing things that seem stupid or unexplainable. Ask students why they think others do things that don’t make sense.
· Emphasize that the essence of culture is the result of learning and experience. Culture cannot be imposed or ‘created;’ it can only be learned.
· Ask students to think about a personal experience where they, as leaders, imposed their values or beliefs on others and recall what happened. Have pairs of students tell each other stories about this and derive conclusions.
Chapter 2 – The Levels of Culture
· Stating underlying assumptions is very difficult. Have students practice writing something at each level—some observed behavioral regularity, some possible values justifying that behavior, and what underlying non-negotiable assumption drives the behavior.
For example:
o Behavior: Students work hard to get better grades and test scores
o Espoused value: I need good grades to get into graduate school
o Underlying assumption: Self-esteem depends upon being “better” than one’s peers
Note that the assumption is hard to admit, yet may be the primary driver of student competitive behavior.
· Student exercise: Have groups of students visit several banks and document the artifacts that they observe. After writing a thorough description of each bank, compare the descriptions and see whether there are differences between the banks. Ask bank representatives why things are done the way the are, referring to the observed differences. Attempt to state the underlying assumption that is driving the observed artifacts in each bank.
Chapter 3 – Cultures in Organizations: Two Case Examples
· Highlight for the students that cultures, like personalities, are a complex mix of elements and cannot be labeled with simple terms like “command and control” as is so often done. Encourage students to tolerate the complexity and not seek to oversimplify right away.
· Continuing the exercise from Chapter 2, ask students to come to terms with their own cultural and personal assumptions by having each student rate how much they like each bank, how much they would like working in that company and why. Then have groups of three share their personal preferences and explore how this reveals their own assumptions based on their own cultural background
· The more people learn to recognize culture within themselves, the better they will be in understanding groups and organizations they encounter.
Chapter 4 – How Culture Emerges in New Groups
· Culture formation and group dynamics are highly inter-related processes and it is therefore necessary for students to take this little detour into group dynamics. The context to be presented to students should be that this will help them understand how in their own groups they are creating culture all the time by becoming aware of how their responses to marker events creates norms.
· A student exercise might be to form random groups and have them spend just 15 minutes in an unstructured situation without a formal leader, and, at the end of the 15 minutes reconstruct how they felt, what they did, and how it worked out. Most groups will discover that they have already built some norms in the 15 minutes. The lesson is that in unstructured situations culture formation happens very rapidly. A second lesson is to show how the psychological factors that drive our social behavior lead to social consequences that eventually then control our behavior.
Chapter 5 – Assumptions About External Adaptation Issues
· The material in Exhibit 5.1 can serve as a course on organizational dynamics. Any organization can be analyzed and studied in terms of the five factors of mission, goals, means, measurements, and remedial processes. Issues of strategy, competition, the role of markets, etc. all can be processed by examining their impact in terms of the five basic issues identified.
· Have students identify several groups that they belong to and ask them to think about what the mission or primary task of each of those groups is...
· The five elements of external adaptation shown in Table 5.1 should then be used by students as a diagnostic grid to assess how various organizations that they can observe in and around the campus manage each area. To get at mission, goals, and means probably requires teams to interview in addition to observe.
Chapter 6 – Assumptions About Managing Internal Integration
· The issues identified in Exhibit 6.1 are a supplement to the issues identified in Chapter 4 and can serve as a complete course on group dynamics, if the instructor chooses to use them in that fashion. At the same time they illustrate what most group dynamics courses do not get into, namely how the group dynamics create culture which eventually controls the dynamics. The group literature is sadly lacking in dealing with culture formation.
· Have students go back to the organizations they analyzed in relation to the Chapter 5 dimensions to assess how those organizations deal with each of the issues identified in this chapter.
Chapter 7 – Deeper Cultural Assumptions About Reality and Truth
· This content is quite abstract so students need to anchor it in their own experience. The best way to do that is to get group of students to reflect on several recent decisions that they made in a group context and to reconstruct how the decision got made in terms of:
o What kind of information was brought to bear? Did group members differentiate facts from opinions? How did they do that?
o Were the group norms favorable to bringing out all the relevant information to the decision? Was the decision based on enough facts? Or did the group settle for consensus among opinions?
o What were the decision norms of rules? Was the assumption made that one should vote and that majority should rule, or was there discussion of how to make the decision, e.g. seek unanimity or consensus?
o Were there differences in the degree to which group members relied on arbitrary authority versus empirical demonstration? In what way did these differences reflect the cultural background of the group members?
Chapter 8 – Assumptions About the Nature of Time and Space
· Getting a good handle on “time” requires some student experiments. For example, students should try being deliberately late for some appointments and then asking the person whom they were visiting how they felt, what their expectations were, etc.
· If the student group contains members from other countries, small heterogeneous groups should discuss the time dimensions and how they work in each of their cultures.
· The use of space provides easy experiments. Ask students to stand deliberately far or close when they are in conversation and watch their own feelings and the behavior of the other person. Here also having students from different countries experiment with this would help, especially Asian countries.
· Students should go visit the banks again and see whether their physical layout gives them some clue as the customer orientation of the bank, some of the assumptions different banks make about their processes.
Chapter 9 – Assumptions About Human Nature, Activity, and Relationships
· The most important dimension to grapple with is Theory X and Y. Ask students to think about jobs they have had and what they think the assumptions of their boss were. What impact did those assumptions have on their performance and morale?
· Ask students now to generalize to organizations they are familiar with and see if they can detect patterns of management that reflect either X or Y assumptions.
· Have students visit coercive (a local mental hospital or prison), calculative (a local business) and moral (a local church or non-profit org.) to see if they detect differences in the artifacts and the espoused values that reflect the deeper assumptions.
· Have students use the role relationship variables to identify the differences between the following relationships: student with friend, student with teacher, student with salesman, student with coach and any other relationships they can think of to contrast how different the assumptions are in each relationship.
Chapter 10 – Cultural Typologies
· Ask student groups to think about local organizations and try to type them using the solidarity/sociability typology or the internal/external/high/low structure typology. After deciding which category an organization falls into, have them predict what else should be true in that organization and then go find out if their prediction is accurate or not.
· Rate the same organizations on Hofstede’s dimensions of Individualism, Tolerance for Ambiguity, Power Distance, and Masculinity and go through the same exercise of thinking what else should be true of the organization based on the profile they have derived.
· Using the Hofstede dimensions ask non U.S. students to rate some of the organizations in their native countries to highlight the national differences which Hofstede has discovered.
Chapter 11 – Deciphering Culture
· Select several student teams and assign each team a different method of inquiry for deciphering the culture on an organization about which they initially know very little. This could be a whole semester long project.
· Evaluate the different methods of inquiry and discuss the ethical problems associated with each method.
Chapter 12 – How Leaders Begin Culture Creation
· Using local organizations such as the college, fraternities or clubs, have students look up historical data (or do interviews) to determine what the assumptions, goals, and ideals were of the founders of each organization. The current values and assumptions of those organizations should then be related back to the founders or strong leaders who arose in subsequent periods in the histories of the organizations.
· Selected biographies of great business leaders can also be assigned for this as well as the next several chapters.
Chapter 13 – How Leaders Embed and Transmit Culture
· Student groups should observe and analyze the behavior of leaders in and around the campus, and interview subordinates to determine how those leaders embed their own values. They should examine the reward system, the control system, the communications, and the formal statements that leaders put out to see which are more or less effective.
Chapter 14 – The Changing Role of Leadership in Organizational “Midlife”
· Have students locate several start-ups and several “old” organizations in the community, visit both kinds of organizations and get a feel for the differences. Using the different bases of differentiation, analyze how the old organizations are differentiated and think about the consequences of that for subgroups and subcultures
Chapter 15 – What Leaders Need to Know About How Culture Changes