ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP IN ORGANIZATIONAL “MIDLIFE” 275the finance department hires economics and finance types, the salesdepartment hires sales types, research and development hires technicalspecialists, and so on. Even though these newcomers to the organizationwill be strongly socialized into the basic culture, as describedin Chapters Twelve and Thirteen, they will bring with them othercultural assumptions derived from their education and from associationwith their occupational community (Van Maanen and Barley,1984). Such differences arise initially from personality differencesthat cause people to choose different occupations and from the subsequenteducation and socialization into an occupation (Holland,1985; Schein, 1971, 1978, 1987b; Van Maanen and Schein, 1979).The cultures of different occupations, in the sense of the sharedassumptions that members of that occupation hold, will differ becauseof the core technology that is involved in each occupation.Thus engineers, doctor, lawyers, accountants, and so on will differfrom each other in their basic beliefs, values, and tacit assumptionsbecause they are doing fundamentally different things, have beentrained differently, and have acquired a certain identity in practicingtheir occupation. One therefore will find in each functional areaa blend of the founder assumptions and the assumptions associatedwith that functional/occupational group.Recall Dougherty’s (1990) study (see Chapter Seven, “What Is‘Information’?”) of successful and unsuccessful new product introductions,in which she found that all product development teamsagreed that one needed to know as much as possible about one’spotential customers, but subcultural assumptions about the customersbiased the kind of information each functional group possessed.A powerful subculture based on technology and occupation isinformation technology (IT), built around a number of assumptionsthat conflict with other subcultural assumptions. The IT culture isa prime example of what I labeled in Chapter Ten an engineering culture,dedicated primarily to improvement and innovation. Forexample, IT makes the following assumptions:• Information can be packaged into bits and transmittedelectronically