NHRD Journal - National HRD Network

Organizational Culture and Sub-Culture
Organizations have been conceptualized as
socio-technical systems (Parikh and Garg,
1992). People who constitute an organization
(employees, managers, owners, etc.) come from
a societal culture, or possibly sub-culture. The
interplay between this "social" reality and
"technical" rationality of organizations is a
defining feature of organizations. This view of
organizations makes culture an integral part
of any organizational change effort.
The concept of culture in organizational
research is more than two decades old now.
The credit for introducing culture in
organization theory generally goes to Pettigrew
(Detert et al., 2000). However, the concept has
often been used vaguely (O'Reilly and
Chatman, 1996). At the same time, the
realization of the importance of organizational
culture in the context of organizational change
has also grown (Detert et al., 2000).
A wide variety of specifications of
organizational culture prevail in literature. But
over the years, some agreement has emerged
around the following key features:
• Organizational culture contains some
combination of artifacts, values and beliefs
and underlying assumptions that
organizational members share about
appropriate behavior. (Cook and Rousseau,
1988)
• These shared conceptions act as a normative
guide for behavior (Daft, 2008).
• Organization culture is holistic, historically
determined, socially constructed and exists
at variety of levels (Hofstede, Neuijen, Ohavy
and Sanders, 1990).
The many levels of organizational culture are
depicted in the following picture (Schein, 1985):
It should be noted here that the real
interpretation of organizational culture in the
context of organizational change efforts is quite
complex. A renowned expert in the domain of
organizational change and culture, Edgar H.
Schein, has aptly summarized these
complexities when advising consulting
psychologists to avoid the trap of assuming
"…that your client knows what culture is and
does, and, worse, you assume that you know
what culture is and does" (Schein, 2003: 79).
Nevertheless, it is useful to be aware of the
techniques that can provide some grip over the
different nuances of culture in an organization.
Therefore, a review of such techniques is
presented here.
Overview of Techniques
The methods to measure culture can be broadly
put in two categories, qualitative and
quantitative. It should be noted that some
scholars advocate the use of multiple methods
to measure organizational culture (Martin,
1992). Blalock and Blalock (1968) suggested
that firstly one should use qualitative
techniques, to be supplemented by quantitative
assessment subsequently. In the following
sections, a review of various methods is
provided.
Qualitative Techniques
Qualitative methods do not attempt to ascribe
a number to various aspects of organizational
culture. They allow researchers and
practitioners the flexibility of digging deeper
into various aspects of organizational culture.
Some of the classic approaches used to study
organizational culture involve the following:
• Case studies: A case study focuses on
understanding the nuances of a single setting
in depth. Case studies can be done at
multiple level of analysis, i.e., individual,
group or organization. Typical techniques
of data collection for case studies include
interviews, archives, observations, etc (Yin,
1994; Eisenhardt, 1989).
November 2007 NHRD Journal 71