ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

ASSESSING CULTURAL DIMENSIONS 345The latter assumption reminded the group members of a wholeseries of artifacts concerning the value they put on their products,why they liked some products better than others, why they valuedsome of their engineers more than others, how their founders hadarticulated their original values, and so on. A whole new issue wasraised about the pros and cons of selling to the government and to thedefense industries versus continuing to focus on the education sector.Assumptions that are important and salient trigger a whole newset of insights and begin to make sense of a whole range of thingsthat previously had not made sense. Often these salient assumptionsreconcile what the group may have perceived as value conflicts.For example, in doing this exercise a group of human resourceprofessionals at an insurance company identified as an importantvalue “becoming more innovative and taking more risks as the environmentchanges,” but the members could not reconcile this goalwith the fact that very little actual innovation was taking place. Inpushing deeper, to the assumption level, they realized that throughoutits history the company had operated on two very central assumptionsabout human behavior: (1) people work best when theyare given clear rules to cover all situations (among the artifacts thegroup had listed was a “mile-long shelf of procedure manuals”), and(2) people like immediate feedback and will not obey rules unlessrule violation is immediately punished. Once the group stated thesetacit assumptions, they realized that these assumptions were drivingtheir behavior far more than the espoused value of innovation andrisk taking. Not only was there no real positive incentive for innovating,but in fact it was risky because any false steps would immediatelybe punished.Another example was the previously cited case of the engineeringgroup at HP that discovered that the espoused values of “teamwork”and “being nice to each other” were overruled by the tacitassumptions that individualistic competitive behavior was the wayto get things done and get ahead.This phase of the exercise is finished when the group and theprocess consultant feel that they have identified most of the critical