ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT MANAGING INTERNAL INTEGRATION 113Reprinted by permission of J. Whitingcally different assumptions about meaning categories, as the cartoonabove shows.For example, in my role as a consultant to a small family-ownedfood company, I asked some managers whether they experiencedany conflicts with subordinates, peers, or superiors in their dailywork. Unless I happened to be talking to a particularly disgruntledperson, I usually elicited an immediate and flat denial of any conflictwhatsoever. This response puzzled me because I had been calledin by the president to help figure out what to do about “severe conflicts”that members of the organization were perceiving and/orexperiencing. I finally realized that I was assuming that the wordconflict was a generally understood term referring to any degree ofdisagreement between two or more people, and that conflict was anormal human condition that is always present to some degree.My interviewees, on the other hand, held two quite differentassumptions. In their view, (1) the word conflict referred to a severe