The culture of the organisation

8.7 The culture of the organisation

When many people first learn that organisations have a definable culture they are somewhat surprised. Up until that moment, most people would have considered culture only as a social or national artefact – this manifestation of culture being determined by race, religion, location in the world and other aspects of the social order. All of these attributes are present within the business environment, but in addition to any national social culture there is a unique business culture relating to that organisa- tion. This will include formal and informal business structures – how people dress, how they behave, how they refer to one another. Do they call the boss ‘sir’ or ‘madam’, or refer to them on first-name terms? Is it jeans and T-shirt or a three-piece suit dress code? It is stated that today is ‘smart casual’ or ‘dress down’ (at Levi’s in San Francisco, the corporate dress is jeans). Is it a conservative or liberal working environment? Is it expected that you turn up at 8.30 am and do not leave until 8.30 pm? Is there an understanding that to do your job well you are not necessarily bound to your desk? There must be many more organisational behaviours of which you are aware.

The elements of organisational culture can be presented in three groups:

1 Company practices, typified by rights, ceremonies and rituals

2 Company communications, such as stories, myths, sagas, legends, folk tales, symbols and slogans

3 Physical cultural forms, including artefacts, physical layout, national and

international teams, common language comprising of industry jargon, company-specific jargon, dominant culture jargon and in-jokes.

The resultant behaviours, whilst making those who are part of the organisation feel inclusive, are also barriers and exclusive. Unless you understand the jargon, the acronyms and the shared behaviours, it is almost impossible to penetrate and understand what is going on easily and quickly. The next contract of the media production programme-maker

Behaviour in media organisations and organisational behaviour

may depend on the ability to deconstruct these behaviours and reflect them in any production submission.

The cultural conditions of an organisation also have an impact on the mindset of the individuals within the organisation, in the shared mental models of the way things are done. In many instances this allows the business to function but also, probably in just as many instances, it is actually disables free thinking in an innovative, creative environment. Sometimes expressing a new view in the wrong format can cause it to be dismissed because the mode of presentation does not conform to the cultural framework. The corporate culture is not necessarily in harmony with the formal company management structure. To an extent it reflects and impacts on the formal hierarchies of the business. Charles Handy, in Understanding

Figure 8.6 The four types of organisation cultural forms 13 . (©Penguin Books 1976, 1981, 1985, 1993. Reprinted by kind permission.)

Managing in the Media

Organisations 13 , suggested that there are four types of organisation cultural forms (Figure 8.6):

1 The power culture

2 The role culture

3 The task culture

4 The person culture. Of the four cultures described, the power culture and the task culture have

the strongest resonance in the audiovisual industry. The power culture is found in the small entrepreneurial organisations typical of many small audiovisual businesses. There is a central figure who controls the whole aspect of the business. It is suggested that we can visualise the structure as being similar to that of a spider’s web. Whilst the business is small, the individual at the centre of the organisation controls all of the activities of the organisation (see Chapter 7). It is a somewhat Machiavellian type of organisation, inasmuch as the end usually justifies the means. ‘It’ll be alright on the night’ is a strong driver within this kind of business.

The role culture image is that of a Greek temple. The pillars represent the departments; specialisations or silos of activity support the centre. The capping stone sits on top of these functional areas, being symbolic of the infrastructure and management of the business.

The task culture is project driven; the image is that of a fishing net. Where the strands intersect, there lies the power in an organisation. It is based on teams getting the job done with a high degree of autonomy. The control is maintained by the managers through resource allocation. The current status of the BBC is a model for this type of organisation. Producers have a degree of autonomy and power with a clear line to the audience, and management exercise control over this power by allocating financial material resources.

The person culture is a little bit more of an amorphous mass, often made up of a group of individuals who need some form of administrative and management support to enable them to do their professional tasks. A doctors’ group practice, a law firm or any team of professionals who feel they have equal standing in the community and amongst their peer group are examples of this type of organisation. To an extent, it is a self-limiting group.

Tom Burns carried out a study of the BBC and suggested that the BBC was

a very segmented organisation, both horizontally (by departments) and vertically (where as you move through the grading structure you lose contact with your professional or craft skill roots). He goes on to suggest

Behaviour in media organisations and organisational behaviour

that ‘in this situation the career and the political systems can become more

important than the formal task system’ 14 .

To an extent, these cultural forms are implicitly built upon and in some cases shadow what might be set up as a formal structure to the business. It may

be true that within the power culture a formal system may exist. However small the company may be, there might be heads of department (such as an editor in post-production) plus a couple of assistants, a sound recordist and editor, and a computer graphics group with 2D and 3D capabilities.

If the owner and director of the company behave as if they are directing a production, they will still be the key decision-makers within the company. To an extent, the behaviour of the company will be an extension of the behaviour of the person at the centre of the business. His or her personality, temperament and leadership style will have an infectious, formal and informal impact on everyone else within the business.

Charles Handy suggests that organisational issues can be divided into three groups:

䊉 People – motivation, needs, level of energy, career/experience, age, individual skills and abilities, pay, personalities, training, role

䊉 Power – groups, the leaders, inter-group relations, type of influence, leadership style, rewards and punishment, responsibilities, control

systems. 䊉 Practicalities – the environment, the market, philosophies, values, norms,

goals, objectives, ownership, history, career structures, size, structure, change, technology.

There has been a great deal written about organisations and the behaviour of organisations in terms of how they manage staff and people internally, and how the organisations faces the external environment. The scope of this book does not offer us the opportunity to explore these many topics in any great detail. As an introductory text, we have concentrated on the role of the individual within the business environment. We have also tried to introduce some of the issues regarding group dynamics that we find in Charles Handy’s classification of organisations. Other aspects of media management, such as control systems, are found in Part 3 of this book, where we look at media production management in more detail.

The legitimate use of authority within an organisation is the accepted form of power within an organisation. It is recognised and bestowed upon the individual as part of the formal structure of the business. The legitimate power encapsulated in authority gives the individual, whether the managing

Managing in the Media

Commitment

Compliance Resistance Stagnation

Revolution

Evolution

Figure 8.7 Compliance, commitment and resistance.

director, the line manager or head of the team, the opportunity to delegate tasks to others. In a successfully functioning organisation, this delegation of roles will be seen as a way of giving opportunities to members of staff. In some dysfunctional organisations, it is seen as a way of pushing the workload onto those at the bottom of the organisation.

Figure 8.7 shows a simple illustration between compliance, commitment and resistance. You gain commitment from the staff when they are fully engaged with and part of the decision-making process. You obtain compliance from the staff when they feel they have no choice but to do the work as required. Resistance and possibly revolution, or at least a strike, is shown to occur when those being given tasks to perform feel that they are not being consulted on the decisions made as to why they should be doing those particular jobs.

Professor Ralph Stacey suggested that in any large organisation there is a whole range of interactions taking place. He suggests that there is a complete shadow organisation by which communication takes place and cultural forms are devised. Figure 8.8 indicates that although there is a ‘rational loop’ of business behaviour, there are at least four other interlocking behaviour models that will impact upon the dynamics of the organisation. How often have you heard it said, if you want to gain insights into the values and attitudes of the managing director, make sure you have

a good relationship with his or her assistant or secretary? Influence is the handmaiden to power.

For Stacey, strategic management education and business behaviour models have tended to be about organising the business in stable equilibrium conditions. He suggests that our real task as managers is to cope with the uncertainty of an unstable future – it is our ability to adapt to a changing environment that will enable one organisation to survive while another

Behaviour in media organisations and organisational behaviour

Basic assumptions

Anxiety

Unconscious process loop

Fear of

Contradiction

failure

and conflict

Organisational Covert Culture and Shared defences

politics cognition mental loop

loop model

Rational loop

Evaluate and select options

CHOOSE Overt

politics loop

Consequences and change in environment

Figure 8.8 The self-organising form of control 15 . (©Pitman Publishing 1993. Reprinted by kind permission of Pearson Education Limited.)

perishes. His models are of particular interest to media managers. By definition, we work in an unpredictable and chaotic working environment. His views about the behaviour of organisations are worth considering. Two

of his points are 16 :

Organisations are characterised by fundamental contradictions: stability and instability; the need to differentiate and the need to integrate; the need for rule-based negative feedback control systems, and the need for flexible amplifying systems to deal with unforeseen, unseeable change which are impended by the negative feedback systems.

People operating in complex systems might easily develop trained incapacity and skilled incompetence. If they are to combat this they

Managing in the Media

need continually to question existing mental models and develop new ones to cope with the unfolding future of the organisational system they operate in. They need to think in system terms.

Chapter 7 looked at the growth of businesses within the media industry. The four cultures described earlier and the Greiner development model all come into play in trying to describe organisational culture. Organisations not only change their structure as they grow, but they also change their cultural form. Most will start as a power culture. Video production companies will then tend to shift into a task culture, where small project teams are producing the work required. As they grow they will inevitably become a role culture type of organisation, when a more rigid structure and reporting system is put in place (see the first two stages in the Greiner model). As a business expands, not only do the owners and managers need to understand the culture of organisations within one national boundary, but they also need to have some sense of cross-cultural sensitivity in international markets and be able to achieve a more understandable form of cultural mis-match. The attributes of the individual and the attributes of the organisation all come into play, with even more complex circles of confusion.

One of the most widely read commentators on cross-cultural issues is Geert Hofstede 17 . He identified four dimensions to classify differences in cultural forms between countries:

1 Power versus distance

2 Collectivism versus individualism

3 Femininity versus masculinity

4 Uncertainty avoidance. Whilst Hofstede applied these dimensions to nation states, in many ways it

is a useful structure to help define the internal cultural form of an organisation as well.

Within organisations, power/distance is about the relationship in the chain between owner, director, manager and staff. A collectivist approach is about consensus; Japan has often been referenced as the archetypal collectivist society. The USA personifies the individual, yet it is a highly conformist society due to a high level of uncertainty avoidance by minimising future risks. It seems that the Anglo-Saxon nature is a wish to control the future. Being willing to show the feminine side of one’s nature

Behaviour in media organisations and organisational behaviour

within the work environment might not be well received in some Middle East countries. This gender scale is not just concerned with the male–

female dimension, but also with the quantity (male)–quality (female) aspects of life – what some firms have characterised as the work–life balance.

This chapter has sought to set the agenda for analysing the individual, the group, the organisation, the industry, and the national and international cultures in which we find ourselves. You might now not only look at the behaviours of others, but also reflect on your own behaviour in the social and organisational environment. Remember, how others act towards us is, to an extent, dependent on our own complicity actions and behaviour.