ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

192 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPdefense against authority, leading to unions and other forms of selfprotectivegroups. In the utilitarian system, peer relations evolvearound the work group and typically reflect the kind of incentive systemthat management uses. In the normative system, they evolvenaturally around tasks and in support of the organization. Sometypologies add a dimension of professional or collegial relationshipsin an organization in which individuals have broad vested rights anda “moral” orientation toward organizational goals, such as in professionalpartnerships in law or medicine (Jones, 1983; Shrivastava,1983).The value of this typology is that it enables us to differentiatebusiness organizations that tend to be utilitarian from coercive totalinstitutions such as prisons and mental hospitals, and from normativeorganizations such as schools, hospitals, and nonprofits (Goffman,1961). The difficulty is that within any given organizationaltype one may see variations of all three dimensions operating, whichrequires us to invent still other dimensions to capture the uniquenessof a given organization.A number of typologies focus specifically on how authority isused and what level of participation is expected in the organization:(1) autocratic, (2) paternalistic, (3) consultative or democratic, (4)participative and power sharing, (5) delegative, and (6) abdicative(which implies delegating not only tasks and responsibilities butpower and controls as well) (Bass, 1981, 1985; Harbison and Myers,1959; Likert, 1967; Vroom and Yetton, 1973).These organizational typologies deal much more with aggression,power, and control than with love, intimacy, and peer relationships.In that regard they are always built on underlying assumptions abouthuman nature and activity. The arguments that managers get intoabout the “correct” level of participation and use of authority usuallyreflect the different assumptions they are making about thenature of the subordinates they are dealing with. Looking at participationand involvement as a matter of cultural assumptions makesclear that the debate about whether leaders should be more auto-