ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF TIME AND SPACE 169achieved by being near someone and whispering rather than byretreating behind closed doors. Thus one finds large rooms builtmore like amphitheaters that permit a senior person to hold court,or sets of offices or cubicles built around a central core that permitseasy access to everyone. One might also expect more visually openenvironments such as the office bullpens that permit supervisors tosurvey the entire department so that they can easily see who mightneed help or who is not working.When buildings and offices are designed in terms of certainintended work patterns, both distance and time are usually consideredin the physical layout. These design issues get very complex,however, because information and communication technology isincreasingly able to shrink time and space in ways that may nothave been considered. For example, a group of people in privateoffices can communicate by telephone, electronic mail, fax, andvideophone and even be a virtual team by using conference callsenhanced by various kinds of computer software, now called Group-Ware (Grenier and Metes, 1992; Johansen and others, 1991).The difficulty of introducing some of these technologies pointsup the interaction of assumptions, in that some managers becomeconscious of the fact that they need face-to-face interaction togauge whether or not their message is getting through and how theother person is reacting. At DEC, for example, electronic mail waswidely used by certain sets of engineers who felt comfortable solvingproblems with each other by this means even if they did notknow each other personally; senior executives, on the other hand,usually insisted on meetings and face-to-face communication.The introduction of new information technologies such as e-mailor groupware sometimes forces to the surface assumptions that hadbeen taken for granted, thereby revealing cultural elements thatmay be incongruent with behavior that would be optimal from thepoint of view of the technology. Conference calls, for example,might be resisted because participants can not read each other’sbody language and facial expressions. E-mail, on the other hand,can facilitate communication because it does not require the sender