ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

140 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIP“Define your own job; figure out how you can best help,” which wasthe typical DEC way. When I talked to this personnel managerabout a year after he had been hired, he said that the first six monthswere absolutely traumatic because he had been brought up in thebest French tradition of expecting a strong boss who would tell a subordinatewhat to do. The manager kept searching for guidance andfor someone to lean on, but he found neither.As he tells the story, one day he finally decided to take some initiativeand try out some of his own ideas. He found immediate supportand positive reinforcement for this behavior. So he took somefurther initiatives and again found that he was encouraged by hisboss and peers. He was learning how to work at DEC, but in describingthis socialization process, he said, “I had to give up my‘Frenchness’ to work in this company. I like it, but I don’t think Icould ever work in a traditional French company after this experience.”Other DEC alumni confirm that the DEC culture was sounusual that once one had learned to work in it, one probably couldnot work in any other company again! The DEC culture ended upmodifying some of the assumptions this man had brought with himfrom his culture of origin.Because of the ultimate importance of these assumptions, wemust understand them at some level of detail so that we can compareorganizations and subunits within them and also begin to comparenational and ethnic cultures on a broader scale. In the remainder ofthis chapter we will take up the first three dimensions, those dealingwith reality and truth, time, and space; in Chapters Eight and Ninewe will examine the other three dimensions—those dealing withhuman nature, human activity, and human relationships.Shared Assumptions Aboutthe Nature of Reality and TruthA fundamental part of every culture is a set of assumptions aboutwhat is real and how one determines or discovers what is real. Suchassumptions tell members of a group how to determine what is rel-