ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

186 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPIn the United States we are also discovering, through a painfulprocess of consciousness-raising, how gender- and race-relatedassumptions come to be so taken for granted that they function tocreate de facto kinds of discrimination through stereotyping and thecreation of various kinds of barriers such as “glass ceilings.” In theseareas many culture researchers have found the best evidence of cultureconflict and genuine ambiguities about roles, influencing eventhe kinds of problems that researchers have identified and studied(Martin, 1991, 2002).Rules of Interaction—The Joint Effect ofTime, Space, and Relationship AssumptionsIn the section on space we saw how intimacy is defined by distanceand position. If we combine such assumptions with assumptionsabout timing and about the appropriate way for people to relate toeach other, we have, in effect, the assumption set that specifies whatin most cultures are thought of as the basic rules of interaction(Goffman, 1967; Van Maanen, 1979b). What we think of as tact,poise, good manners, and etiquette can be deconstructed into a setof rules that preserve the social order—what Goffman and othershave called “face work.” In other words, in every human group, themembers sooner or later learn that in order to survive as a group,they must develop rules and norms that make the environment safefor all. Members must learn to preserve each other’s face and selfesteem,lest the social environment become dangerous. If I humiliateyou, I license you to humiliate me.The content of these basic rules of interaction will differ fromgroup to group, but the existence of some set of such rules can besafely predicted for any group that has had some stability and jointhistory. For example, both DEC and Hewlett-Packard (HP) stronglyespoused teamwork as a necessary condition for successful performance,and in both companies it was considered bad not to be ateam player. But when one examines the actual rules of interactionin operation, one discovers almost diametrically opposed assump-