ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

190 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPThe engineer learns new categories and words, as do the doctor, thelawyer, and the manager. The employee going into DEC and theemployee going into Ciba-Geigy learn different things.The scientist trying to study a given area such as human behaviorin organizations, leadership, and organizational culture mustdevelop categories that are useful for helping to make sense of thevariations that he or she observes. Such categories can derive fromcultural categories that already exist or can be invented and labeledwith new words, such as monochronic and polychronic as dimensionsof the concept of time.Such new concepts become useful if they (1) help make senseand provide some order out of the observed phenomena, and (2)help to define what may be the underlying structure in the phenomenaby building a theory of how things work, which, in turn,(3) enables us to predict to some degree how other phenomena thatmay not yet have been observed are going to look.In the process of building new categories—which can bethought of as defining the dimensions to be studied—we inevitablymust become more abstract. And as we develop abstractions itbecomes possible to develop hypothetical relationships among suchabstractions, which we then can think of as typologies or theoriesof how things work. The advantage of such typologies and the theoriesthey permit us to postulate is that they attempt to order a greatvariety of different phenomena. The disadvantage and danger isthat they are so abstract that they do not reflect adequately the realityof a given set of phenomena being observed. In this sense,typologies can be useful if we are trying to compare many organizationsbut can be quite useless if we are trying to understand one particularorganization.For example, extroversion and introversion as a personalitytypology is enormously useful in broadly categorizing observed socialbehavior, but may be too general to enable us to understand a particularperson. Noting that cultures around the world are individualisticor communitarian can be very useful in making sense out ofthe huge variation we observe, but can be quite useless in trying to