ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

288 ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIPspecifics of such beliefs differed from industry to industry and companyto company, but at each company studied, senior managementhad strong beliefs in these three areas, and those beliefs guided specificdecisions about goals, means, and management practices.What we can say about the nature of hierarchical cultures,then, is that they are similar in structure; the basic assumptions areconcerned with the same kinds of issues that all top managers face.How they resolve those issues, however, depends on other factors,such as the technology, the maturity of the products and markets,and the unique historical experience of each company.One could extrapolate further and hypothesize that the subcultureat each level of the organization will, over time, structurallyreflect the major issues and tasks that must be confronted at that leveland that the resolution of those tasks will provide different kinds ofcultural content in different industries and companies. Thus all firstlinesupervisors will develop assumptions about human nature andhow to manage employees, but whether they develop idealistic assumptionsor cynical assumptions will depend more on the industryand actual company experience. Similarly, all sales managers willdevelop assumptions about human motivation on the basis of theirexperience in managing salespeople, but whether they come to believein salary plus commission, pure commission, bonus systems, orindividual or team reward systems will again depend upon the industryand the company.In other words, the structure of any given hierarchical level’sculture will be primarily defined by the tasks that must be achievedat that level. One can also anticipate that the group will have onlyweak assumptions or no assumptions at all in other areas because itsmembers have not faced tasks or had shared experiences in thoseareas. To again use the first-line supervisor as an example, he or shemay have very strong assumptions about human nature and eitherweak assumptions or no assumptions about how much debt a companyshould carry. On the other hand, top management will havevery strong assumptions about debt level and only weak ones abouthow to manage technology or specific customer sets.