ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

CULTURAL TYPOLOGIES 199Exhibit 10.1. The Assumptions ofthe Three Organizational Subcultures, Cont’d.• One cannot get reliable data from below because subordinates will tellone what they think one wants to hear; therefore, as CEO one musttrust one’s own judgment more and more (i.e., lack of accurate feedbackincreases the sense of one’s own rightness and omniscience)• Organization and management are intrinsically hierarchical; thehierarchy is the measure of status and success and the primary meansof maintaining control• Because the organization is very large it becomes depersonalized andabstract, and, therefore, has to be run by rules, routines (systems), andrituals (“machine bureaucracy”)• Though people are necessary, they are a necessary evil, not an intrinsicvalue; people are a resource like other resources, to be acquired andmanaged, not ends in themselves• The well-oiled machine organization does not need whole people, onlythe activities that are contracted fordesigners are truly needed in order to invent new and better productsand processes, even though some of those processes make some peoplesuperfluous or obsolete; and executives are truly needed to worryabout the financial viability of the whole organization even thoughthat sometimes requires curbing expensive innovations or laying peopleoff. In terms of a competing values model described above, theissue is how to align the goals of the three subcultures: focusing ondoing the job, remaining innovative to deal with changes in the environment,and staying economically healthy. When one of these subculturesbecomes too dominant, the organization cannot survive—aswas the case with DEC, where the engineering innovation mentalityoverrode both the operations and executive cultures.Summary and ConclusionsThe value of typologies is that they simplify thinking and provideuseful categories for sorting out the complexities we must deal withwhen we confront organizational realities. They provide categories