Culture, Change, and Org Forms

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Another dimension that Hofstede looked at was something that he called “masculinity versus femininity.” The terms are often a little bit confusing. What Hofstede was really trying to get at was what kind of values—such as nurturing and trust—were valued.

What kind of values—such as nurturing and trust—were valued.

Did the organization value trust and nurturing, which he associated with femininity, or did they value dominance and power, which he associated with masculinity?

Another dimension he talked about was uncertainty avoidance. How much did the society avoid uncertainty, avoid taking risks, and was afraid to make mistakes or have failures versus the other side, which was a high-risk culture?

We can see in certain cultures that are low in uncertainty, entrepreneurism, entrepreneurship tends to thrive. When uncertainty avoidance is high, they tend to not have a lot of entrepreneurship activities.

The last dimension that Hofstede looked at was what he called “time orientation,” or long-term vs. short-term orientation. Some countries, using the United States as an example, have very short time horizons.

Long-term vs. short-term orientation

You can think of the push for quarterly results in companies and organizations as an extreme short-term orientation. On the other hand, a lot of Asian countries—like Japan for example—have long-term orientations.

When the new CEO of Toyota was asked what he thought the company's prospects for the future were, he projected a 50-year time frame. So, you can begin to see the difference between short-term versus long-term orientation. These are all dimensions of national culture, as defined by Hofstede.

Now, we can think about national cultures as clusters, people who share certain kinds of values. And organizations can cluster as well, into certain kinds of values.

One model, called the "competing values model," actually looked at different clusters of organizational values, and how organizations fit across different continuums.

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Some organizations will look more like a family.

On the other hand, some organizations are very market driven: they're focused on the external environment, they make decisions based on changes in the environment, and are less concerned with the internal dynamics and the internal emotions of decision-making.

Some organizations are very market driven.

Another type of organizational culture is called an "adhocracy." They make very quick decisions, are very entrepreneurial, and take a lot of risks.

The fourth type of culture explained in this framework is a hierarchical culture. They have a lot of top-down authority, decision-making is often slow, and decisions are arrived at through a series of systematic processes.

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What the competing values model shows is that organizations can cluster along a continuum of values, just like national cultures.

Episode 2

As a leader, one of the biggest challenges you're going to face is, how do you deal with change. Change is going to be something that you're going to be faced with on a continual basis. It's just the natural state of affairs in today's organizations.

A better understanding of how change works and what the faces of change are—what are the factors that influence change—is a good place to start to understand how to manage change in organizations.

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I like to think of change existing on a couple different dimensions. One is, where does the change begin? Does the change emanate from changes in the external environment, or does the change begin internally?

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Does the change emanate from ... the external environment, or does the change begin internally?

For example, does the change come because of a shift in markets, because of a shift in technology? Those would be external forces for change.

Internal forces for change might include the change of a CEO, or a new process within the organization emerges. So, change can come from either within or without.

Another dimension of change to consider is the pace or the rate of change. Is change something that's happening slowly over time, or it is something that's happening at a rapid pace, something that happening in a very quick way?

Consider the pace or the rate of change.

We tend to think of short-term change as something that comes about because of a crisis or because of something that suddenly happens. That crisis can be a lot of different things. Developmental change is change that's incremental—it happens over time, and it's a step-by-step process.

Most organizations need to prepare for both types of change, both the incremental change that happens over time, but they also need to be prepared with crises. In many ways, today's organization is characterized a lot by the ability of the leader to respond to crises.

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Trying to Change the World Bank

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We'll talk more about crises in a later session of this program. Another way to think about change, or another dimension, is change planned, or is it something that's thrust upon the organization externally, and how the organization deals with that.

Is change planned, or is it something that's thrust upon the organization externally?

Most organizations find themselves responding to change because they haven't taken the proper action, haven't set up the right processes, or haven't recognized their own internal need to change in order to respond to external circumstances.

So, first understanding the dimensions of change is an important part of being able to lead the change process. There's a couple important models of change out there that you might want to understand because these will help you manage the change process, both in terms of how you think about