Organisational Culture & Managing change


Organisational Culture

An organisational culture is a pattern of beliefs and expectations shared by the members of organisation. Culture represent independent set of values and ways of behaviors. It is the “glue” that the organisation’s all aspects are bound together.
Values drive all behavior. Values can make competitive advantage for an organisation. Values can be thoughts of both individuals and organisations live. (Sullivan, Sullivan, and Buffton, 2001). Researchers have found work relation values that hold by individuals are taking responsibility, achieving results, developing a sense of worth, recognition and being able to use skills and abilities while some of organisational values are integrity, respect, customer focus, involvement, quality, creativity/ innovation, accountability and fairness (Sullivan, Sullivan, and Buffton, 2001).Individual values can be aligned with organisational values in order to accomplish organisational objectives, hence culture of an organisation can be driven by individual values.

Investigation of  the differences between 156 non-unionized employees of one Japanese owned automobile plant and 144 unionized employees of one US-owned automobile plant in the USA resulted that employees in the Japanese-owned plant had higher scores for family orientation and loyalty, open communication, team approach, manager knowledge, organizational commitment, organization-based self-esteem, organizational instrumentality, intrinsic satisfaction, and extrinsic satisfaction than those in the US-owned plant (Li-Ping, Kim and O’Donald,2000)  The Japanese management philosophy is a direct outgrowth of their culture. This Japanese philosophy is evident in several basic principles in which they believe: trust employees, build employee loyalty to the company, invest in training, treat employees as resources, recognize employee accomplishments, decentralize decision making, and employ consensual decision making (Cole, 1980; Harper, 1988; Johnson and Ouchi, 1974 cited in Li-Ping, Kim and O’Donald,2000).
A ten year study conducted to find out impact of union and non-union groups on organizational culture and change fount that unions can often create cultural dynamics that pose challenges to the effectiveness of organizations and can be difficult to change (Nieminen, 2012).

According to Nieminen (2012), there are sub cultures in an organisation which represent primary work group, occupational or professional skills, gender and age. Further, Nieminen (2012) found that unions reporting reduced empowerment, less effective teamwork and less support for career development and advancement within the company. It means unions have a distinct culture in comparison to non-union groups and that the nature of the cultural variation may present a challenge to the well-being of the company.

Power is the capacity to impress the dominance of one’s goal or value on others (Armstrong, 2001). Sources of power exerted by the leaders are vary. Referent power and expert power characterized by the transformational leadership. The net effect of individualized consideration and other transformational leadership behaviors is empowerment of followers (Behling and McFillen, 1996 cited in Stone, Russell, and Patterson, 2004).Leadership can influence in order to maintain healthy culture to achieve organisational objectives.   Farling et al. (1999) concluded that servant leader’s find the source of their values in a spiritual base. Furthermore, they argued that empowering followers allows the servant leader to act on his or her embedded values. 
Empowerment of employees diminishes the requirement of presence of unions and therefore affect positively towards “no unionism. Empowerment is a concept whereby employees are responsible their actions and hence they should be given authority to make decisions. In most cases unions are playing politics to convince their consent on individuals or groups and it may be viewed as unethical.

Management of change.
If the existing culture is unhealthy to an organaisation, it is advisable to manage change. The change process redirects the strategies which was failed. Dunphy and stace, (1988) describes four styles of leadership: incremental, transformational, collaborative and coercive. Thornhill et al. (2000) describes seven relevant HR practices;

§  Cultural change

§  Recruitment

§  Performing management practices

§  Resource development

§  Reward management

§  Management of employee relations

§  Downsizing.
Therefore, cultural change and management of employee relations are critical HR practices. Managing employee relations without unions is necessity for nonunionosm as unions are change resistance in nature. According to Ulrich , (1997) Change agent is one of four roles for the HR professional and change actively shaping organisational process and culture. 
corporations studied include Black & Decker, Eli Lilly, Gillette, Grumman, IBM, and Polaroid. My study suggests that such companies benefit most from the flexibility they have to improve productivity in both the short and the long run. These companies’ rich legacies and traditions affect their managers and employees profoundly.


Reference. 
Armstrong, M. (2001) A Handbook of Human Resource Management Practice, 8th edn. Philadelphia: Kogan Page Ltd.
Dunphy, D.C. and Stace, D.A. (1988) Transformational and coercive strategies for planned organizational change: Beyond the OD model. Organization studies, 9:3, pp.317-334.
Farling, M.L., Stone, A.G. and Winston, B.E. (1999) Servant leadership: Setting the stage for empirical research. Journal of Leadership Studies, 6:1-2, pp.49-72.
Li-Ping Tang, T., Kim, J.K. and O’Donald, D.A.(2000) Perceptions of Japanese organizational culture-Employees in non-unionized Japanese-owned and unionized US-owned automobile plants. Journal of Managerial Psychology, 15:6, pp.535-559. Available at:https://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/pdfplus/10.1108/02683940010373383. (Accessed:  5th June 2018) 
Nieminen, L. (2012) Unions Can Present Challenges to Organizational Culture and Change. Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP).Available at: https://www.newswise.com/articles/unions-can-present-challenges-to-organizational-culture-and-change (Accessed:  5th June 2018) 
Stone, G.A., Russell, R.F. and Patterson, K. (2004) Transformational versus servant leadership: A difference in leader focus. Leadership & Organization Development Journal, 25:4, pp.349-361.
Sullivan, W., Sullivan, R. and Buffton, B. (2001) Aligning individual and organisational values to support change. Journal of Change Management, 2(3), pp.247-254. Available at:https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/738552750 (Accessed:  8th June 2018)

Thornhill, A., Lewis, P., Saunders, M. and Millmore, M. (2000) Managing Change. A Human Resource Strategy Approach, Harlow: Financial Times Prentice Hall.

Ulrich, D. (1997). Human Resource Champions. Boston: Harvard University Press. 

Comments

  1. NohaniJuly 21, 2018 at 8:04 PM

    Hi Shanali,

    As you have mentioned, employee empowerment is a good solution to avoid unionism in any organization. Addition to this, open door culture can also help to avoid the unionism. Because, all the employees get a chance to speak with their supervisors and managers and by this the issues can be solved then and there without leading to unionism.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Glenn HannanDecember 11, 2021 at 8:26 AM

    Very informative and impressive post you have written, this is quite interesting and i have went through it completely, an upgraded information is shared, keep sharing such valuable information. Door Supervisor Training Feltham

    ReplyDelete

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