ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

194 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPGoffee and Jones use these dimensions to identify four types ofcultures:1. Fragmented—low on both dimensions2. Mercenary—high on solidarity, low on sociability3. Communal—high on sociability, low on solidarity4 Networked—high on both.Each type has certain virtues and liabilities that are described, butthe typology misses a crucial dimension that has been identified byAncona (1988) and others: the relationship between the group(organization) and its external environments, the boundary managementfunction that must be added to the task and maintenancefunctions. Without a model of what happens at the boundary it isnot possible to determine which of the types of culture is effectiveunder given conditions.The Goffee and Jones dimensions are useful for diagnosingsome elements of a culture, and the authors provide self-diagnosticquestionnaires, but it is somewhat presumptuous to assert that aquestionnaire designed just to measure the dimensions that theauthors have started with should be adequate to capturing somethingas complex as an organizational culture. They provide no validationof any sort that the dimensions and how they are measuredare related to other organizational indicators or even measure whatthey are supposed to measure.Aspects of physical space, time, communication, and identityare made derivative from the two core dimensions, which meansthat the diagnostician sees everything through those lenses. Moreproblematic is that there is no way of knowing how important thesedimensions are in the total pattern of dimensions that make up anygiven culture. One may decide in a given company that we are acommunal culture, and this judgment may be valid, but it may beculturally irrelevant in that the important tacit assumptions drivingthe behavior of that organization may have very little to do witheither sociability or solidarity. Recall that in the case of Digital and