3.3 Organizational Cultures

National cultures offer entrepreneurs thinking frameworks to manage their organizations through shaping organizational cultures. Organizational or corporate cultures have been a fashionable topic since the early 1980s. At that time, the management literature began to popularize the claim that the“excellence”of an organization is contained in the common ways by which its members have learned to think, feel and act.

3.3.1 Definition of Organizational Culture

Organizational culture is a soft, holistic concept with hard consequences. Geert Hofstede once called it“the psychological assets of an organization”, which can be used to predict what will happen to its financial assets （Hofstede & Garratt, 1994）. The organizational culture is a system of shared meaning and beliefs held by members of an organization that determines, in large degree, how they act toward each other and outsiders. Shared values relate to mission statements, objectives, logo, and corporate dress code and so on. They can also be referred to as high profile symbols and fostered by senior management. A content theme underlies interpretations of several cultural manifestations. These content themes can be cognitive （beliefs or tacit assumptions）, or they can be attitudinal （values）. Sometimes, themes are“core values”that top managers list and are expressed in a mission statement, a statement of the purpose of an organization. Other themes are inferred deductively by researchers or employees, which reflect a deeper level of interpretation. These themes or values focus on such aspects as: what people say is the reason for their behavior, what they ideally would like those reasons to be, and what often their rationalizations for their behavior are.

Low profile symbols, which are taken for granted assumptions, include stories, organizational practices, organizational jargon, physical symbols, rituals and routines. The organizational stories and the practices are related but the former may refer more closely to culture as guiding best practice while the later may relate more closely to the ways in which organizations are distinguished from each other. A story describes what people talk about in the organization. Furthermore, it describes what matters in the organization and what constitutes success or failure. To help employees learn the culture, organizational stories anchor the present in the past, provide explanations and legitimacy for current practices, and exemplify what is important to the organization.

Cultural arrangements of organizations may be studied by discovering and synthesizing their rules of social interaction and interpretation, as revealed in the behavior they shape. Social interaction and interpretation are communication activities, so it follows that culture could be described by articulating communication rules （Schall, 1993）. A routine describes the normal ways of undertaking tasks. In short, the procedures are not always written down, yet it is part of invisible organizational cultures.

3.3.2 Types of Organizational Cultures

Hofstede et al. （1990 in Patel,2014） develops six-dimensional model of corporate culture. This model consist of such dimension as: process-oriented versus results-oriented; employee-oriented versus job-oriented; parochial versus professional; open system versus closed system; loos versus tight control; normative versus pragmatic.

Deal and Kennedy find that a company's culture, its inner values, rites, rituals and heroes are more important in determining a firm's long term prosperity than the rational aspects of management—financial planning, personnel policies and cost controls. Their work offers explicit guidelines for diagnosing the culture of an organization and for using the power of culture to significantly influence how business gets done. Their findings include four components. First are values, i.e., basic concepts and beliefs. Second are heroes, i.e., the champions who personify the values. Third are rituals and rituals indicating why they are needed. Fourth is the culture network, i.e., communication style. Using these four components as criteria, they categorize organizational cultures into the following four types as shows in Table 3.3 （Scottish Qualifications Authority, 2005）.

3.3.3 Levels of Organizational Culture

Organizational culture is not necessarily the same working consistently throughout the whole organizations. There are three levels of organizational culture working at organizational, subculture group and individuals level in an organization respectively. This section introduces Martin's （2002） insights on perspectives and levels of organizational culture.

Integration

Integration is characterized by harmony and homogeneity. The integration perspective focuses on those manifestations of a culture that have mutually consistent interpretations and consensus throughout an organization. Culture is clear while ambiguity is excluded. Culture is like a solid monolith that is seen the same way by most people, no matter from which angle they view it. Each cultural manifestation mentioned is consistent with the next, creating a net of mutually reinforcing elements. Collectivity-wide consensus is another hallmark of an integration study. Yet this image of organization-wide harmony and homogeneity is difficult to sustain, given the salience of inconsistencies, disruptions, conflicts, and ambiguities in contemporary organizations. The culture will manifest itself at the levels of observable artifacts and shared espoused values, norm, and rules of behavior. At this deep level, tacit assumptions are supposedly shared on an organization-wide basis.

Differentiation

Differentiation focuses on separation and the possibility of conflict. The differentiation perspective focuses on cultural manifestations that have inconsistent interpretations, such as when top executives announce a policy and then behave in a policy-inconsistent manner. From the differentiation perspective, consensus exists within an organization-but only at lower levels of analysis, labeled“subcultures”. Subcultures may exist in harmony, independently, or in conflict with each other. Within a subculture, all is clear. Ambiguity is banished between subcultures. To express the differentiation perspective in a metaphor, subcultures are like islands of clarity in a sea of ambiguity. Differentiation generally views differences, including inconsistencies, as inescapable and desirable, both descriptively and normatively. Dissenting voices are not silenced or ignored and subculture differences are a focus of attention. Relationships among subcultures may be mutually reinforcing, conflicting, or independent. To the extent that ambiguity is acknowledged in a differentiation study, it is described as occurring in the gaps among subcultural ‘islands' of consistency, consensus and clarity.

Fragmentation

Fragmentation is characterized by multiplicity. The fragmentation perspective conceptualizes the relationship among cultural manifestations as neither clearly consistent nor clearly inconsistent. Instead, interpretations of cultural manifestations are ambiguously related to each other, placing ambiguity, rather than clarity, at the core culture. In the fragmentation view, consensus is transient and issue specific. When an issue becomes salient （perhaps because a new policy has been introduced or the environment of the collectivity has changed） some individuals are actively involved （both approving and disapproving） in this issue. At the same time, other individuals are indifferent to or unaware of this particular issue. Fragmentation perspective is the most difficult perspective to articulate because it focuses on ambiguity, and ambiguity is difficulty to conceptualize clearly. Fragmentation includes more than the ambiguity that derives from ignorance or confusion. It includes irreconcilable tensions between opposites sometime described as ironies, paradoxes, or contradictions. Ambiguity can be seen as abnormal, a problematic void that ideally should be filled with meaning and clarity. Alternatively, fragmentation studies are more likely to view ambiguity as normal, salient, and inescapable part of organizational functions in the contemporary world. When culture is studied from a fragmentation perspective, ambiguities take center stage and are usually not viewed as abnormal, escapable, or problematic. The ambiguities can be held at different levels: interpersonal as well as intrapersonal;interorganizational as well as intraorganisational.

Culture should be viewed from all three theoretical perspectives, not sequentially but simultaneously. In accord with the integration view, some aspects of the culture will be shared by most members. Producing consistent and clear interpretations of manifestations the hallmarks of the integration perspective are consistency across manifestations, collectivity-wide consensus, and clarity. In accord with the differentiation perspective, other aspects of the culture will be interpreted differently by different groups, creating subcultures that overlap and nest with each other in relationships of harmony, independence, and/ or conflict. The defining characteristics of the differentiation perspective are inconsistencies across manifestations, with consensus and clarity only within subcultures. Subcultures can exist in harmony, conflict, or independently of each other. Finally, in accord with the fragmentation view, some aspects of the culture will be interpreted ambiguously, with irony, paradox, and irreconcilable tensions. The fragmentation view focuses on ambiguity, excluding the clarity implicit in both consistency and inconsistency. Rather than seeking consensus within cultural or subcultural borders, the fragmentation perspective finds only transient, issue-specific affinities （Martin, 2002）.

According to three dimensions of comparison, i.e., the relationship among cultural manifestations, the orientation to consensus in a culture, and treatment of ambiguity and the level of organizations, research findings mentioned above can be summarized in Table 3.4 and Table 3.5.