ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

THE ROLE OF LEADERSHIP IN ORGANIZATIONAL “MIDLIFE” 277• Technology should adapt to people and be user friendly• Hierarchy is intrinsic to human systems and a necessarycoordination mechanism, no matter how efficient networkedcommunications are• Control of information is a necessary management tool andthe only way of maintaining power and statusIf a CEO understands the different assumptions of these subcultures,he or she must realize that they can influence the course ofthe organization’s evolution through the kinds of incentives andcontrols they create. They can grant more power to the IT functionto further its assumptions, or they can tell their operational unitsthat they do not have to follow a common solution proposed by theIT function.With organizational growth and continued success, functionalsubcultures become stable and well articulated. Organizationsacknowledge this most clearly when they develop rotational programsfor the training and development of future leaders. When ayoung manager is rotated through sales, marketing, finance, and production,she or he is learning not only the technical skills in each ofthese functions but also the point of view, perspective, and underlyingassumptions of that function; that is, its subculture. Such deeperunderstanding is thought to be necessary to doing a good job as ageneral manager later in the career. Organizations in which generalmanagement have always come from just one function often complainthat their leaders make less effective integrative decisionsbecause they do not really understand the requirements of the otherfunctions.In some cases the communication barriers between functionalsubcultures become so powerful and chronic that organizations havehad to invent new boundary-spanning functions or processes. Theclearest example is production engineering, a function whose majorpurpose is to smooth the transition of a product from engineeringinto production. If one asks why this function is necessary, one findsthat without it engineering often designs things that cannot be built