ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

CULTURAL TYPOLOGIES 197with each other, causing the organization to be less effective than itcould be (Schein, 1996a).Every organization has a task to be performed, and the set ofpeople who get the work done—the line organization—can bethought of as the operator group that will typically form an operatorculture. At the same time, every organization has a set of peoplewhose job it is to design the work products and processes, who aremore concerned about innovation, improvement, and redesign; thisgroup can be thought of as the engineers whose engineering culturewill be based externally in their occupational reference group. If theorganization is a high-tech company, the engineers will evolve theirassumptions from their engineering education and the current profession.If the organization is a hospital, the primary care physiciansand nurses can be thought of as the operators and the researchphysicians as the engineers, who are more concerned about theirinnovations in their specialty than daily patient care.Every organization must somehow survive economically in orderto continue to fulfill its functions, its primary task. The ultimate survivaltask falls to what we can think of as the executive group, whosefundamental task is not only to ensure that the organization survivesand continues to be effective, but who must integrate or at least alignthe other two cultures to maximize long-run effectiveness. In mostorganizations the executive function is tied in to the financial communityin some way. Therefore, the executive culture that evolves isinevitably built around financial matters. Exhibit 10.1 shows theassumptions that are typically found in members of these three culturesand highlights the potential conflict between them. As with alltypologies, these are abstractions that will not fit every case, but inevery organization one can find some version of each of these culturesand one can then attempt to assess the degree to which theyare in conflict or are constructively aligned.The point of treating these as separate “occupational” cultures isto highlight the fact that each of these sets of assumptions is valid andnecessary for organizations to remain effective. People are truly neededto deal with unforeseen contingencies and surprises; engineers and