ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS 47stand why there was simultaneously intense conflict—with authorityfigures, insubordination, and bad-mouthing of bosses—andintense loyalty to the organization and personal affection acrosshierarchical boundaries, without also understanding the fifth interlockingassumption:5. We are one family whose members will take care of eachother (implying that no matter how much of a troublemakerone was in the decision process, one was valued in the familyand could not be kicked out of it).It is only when one grasps these first five assumptions that onecan understand, for example, why my initial interventions of tryingto get the group to be “nicer” to each other in the communicationprocess were politely ignored. I was seeing the group’s “effectiveness”in terms of my values and assumptions of how a “good” groupshould act. The DEC senior management committee was trying toreach “truth” and make valid decisions in the only way they knewhow and by a process that they believed in. The group was merelya means to an end; the real process going on in the group was abasic, deep search for solutions in which they could have confidencebecause they stood up even after intense debate.Once I shifted my focus to helping them in this search for validsolutions, I figured out what kinds of interventions would be more relevantand I found that the group accepted them more readily. Forexample, I began to emphasize agenda setting, time management,clarifying some of the debate, summarizing, consensus testing oncedebate was running dry, and in other ways focused more on the taskprocess rather than the interpersonal process. The interrupting, theemotional conflicts, and the other behavior I observed initially continued,but the group became more effective in its handling of informationand in reaching consensus. It was in this context that Igradually developed the philosophy of being a “process consultant”instead of trying to be an expert on how groups should work (Schein,1969, 1988, 1999a, 2003).