ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

102 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPSenior management therefore checked every decision that was to bemade about refugees with virtually every other department and severallayers of management, to ensure that the decision would notoffend one of the supporting governments. However, this processmarkedly slowed decision making and often led to “lowest commondenominator” conservative decisions. This, in turn, led to great irritationon the part of field workers, who felt that they were usuallydealing with crisis situations in which a slowdown might mean deathfor significant numbers of refugees. They perceived top managementto be hopelessly mired in what they considered to be simply bureaucratictangles, and they did not understand the caution that top managementfelt it had to exercise toward sponsoring governments.Lack of agreement across the hierarchy on how to judge success—theamount of money contributed or the number of refugeesprocessed—was the major source of difficulty in improving theoverall performance and level of employee satisfaction in this organization.In addition, there may have been a basic lack of consensuseven on the core mission. Whereas the field workers tended tothink of the core mission as helping the survival of refugees, seniormanagement was clearly more concerned with the survival of thetotal organization, which, in its view, depended on how it related tothe United Nations and to the host governments. Senior managementhad to decide whether to indoctrinate field workers moreeffectively on what the core organizational survival problem reallywas, or to live with the internal conflict that the lack of consensusseemed to generate. On the other hand, the younger, idealistic fieldworkers could well argue (and did) that to survive as an organizationmade no sense if the needs of refugees were not met. In thisorganization, then, one would have to speak of conflicting culturalassumptions or conflicting subcultures in that the headquarters andfield each had consensus but there was an absence of a total organizationalconsensus on mission, goals, and means.At Ciba-Geigy a comparable issue arose in evaluating the performanceof different divisions. The high-performing divisionschose to compare themselves internally to the low-performing divi-