Culture is often said “to eat strategy for breakfast” the implication that, regardless of how good a strategy is, unless specific initiatives are concentrated on changing people’s attitudes, behaviours and work practices, the strategy will fail. Understanding culture of an organisation can be quite the task especially in large companies with a number of employees and staff being very diverse culturally. With the help of Cultural Models, understanding the cultural situation becomes easier. Following are some of the existing Cultural Models.
1. Edgar Schein’s Model
Edgar Schein’s model is one such which helps interpret what the cultural position is within the firm. To Schein, culture is dynamic and multi-faceted; it cannot be easily judged as good/bad, strong/weak, or effective/ineffective. Culture is contextual and lives within us as individuals as well as within groups of people. Edgar Schein believed that as employees go through various changes and adapt to the external environment and solve organizational problems, organizations take time to develop a culture. They learn from their past experiences and start implementing practices, and the attitudes of employees form the culture within the organization collectively. Schein believed an organization culture has three levels and a culture assessment method.
However, in an organization, once Schein’s model’s advantages have turned into deficiencies, due to the temporary feature, the evolution mechanism of Schein model is annulled with partly function on managed changes. Because of the lack of genetic classification, there can be no straightforward comparison between organizations. Therefore, it can be said that in a particular organisation, the Schein model can assist an organisation evaluate cultural shift efficiently. It should merge other analytical models or concepts in the event of a particular organisation, based on the specific features of those organisations.
Read More: Edgar Schein’s Three Layers of Organisational Culture
2. Hofstede’s Model
Next we have is the Hofstede’s model, Psychologist Dr Geert Hofstede published his cultural dimensions model at the end of the 1970s, based on a decade of research. Since then, it’s become an internationally recognized standard for understanding cultural differences. Hofstede studied people who worked for IBM in more than 50 countries. Initially, he identified four dimensions that could distinguish one culture from another. Later, he added fifth and sixth dimensions, in cooperation with Drs Michael H. Bond and Michael Minkov. These are: Power Distance Index Individualism Versus Collectivism, Masculinity Versus Femininity, Uncertainty Avoidance Index, Long- Versus Short-Term Orientation and Indulgence Versus Restraint.
The research by Hofstede implies that the country’s national population is a homogenous whole. However, most nations are a heterogeneous collage of different societies. His research focuses exclusively on countries as analytical units of society. However, research discovers that culture is actually divided across community and domestic lines and often overlaps across domestic borders. His study is also overwhelmingly western-centred and mainly disregarding alternative frameworks.
Read More: Hofstede’s Model of Organisational Culture
3. Schwartz’s Model
The theory identifies ten fundamental personal values recognized throughout cultures and explains where they come from. The concept that values create a circular framework reflecting the motivations expressed by each item is at the core of the hypothesis. This circular design is obviously culturally universal, capturing disputes and alignment between the ten principles.
The results from this theory confirm the importance of work and organizational values for relevant individual outcome variables. However the aggregation of scores of organizational values to determine additional objective gives an underestimation of the true importance of organizational values, especially for attitudinal outcomes. The first limitation of this study might be that common variance in methods inflates the correlations between work values, organizational values, and results. This study’s second limitation is that the data was cross-sectional.
4. Charles Handy’s Model
The method of viewing culture by Charles Handy led researchers to use it to link organizational structure with culture. Handy identified four different types of cultures: ‘ Power Culture, ” Role Culture, ” Task Culture, ‘ and ‘ Person Culture’. According to Handy, Power Culture can be symbolised as a ‘web’ and it refers to control that is spread out like a network from the centre to the rest of the organisation.
There are also constraints to Handy’s strategy. There is an inclination to accept Handy’s four cultures as settled or’ granted’ styles— something an organisation has, rather than something that has been developed, negotiated and distributed by everyone engaged in the organisation and that can develop over moment. None of the four types can claim to be better or superior; each is appropriate for various kinds of conditions. Most real-life organisations tend to contain a combination of cultures and from Handy’s point of perspective, each is appropriate for distinct kinds of situations, including distinct personality kinds.
Read More: Handy’s Model of Organisational Culture
5. Johnson and Scholes’s Model – The Cultural Web
The Cultural Web is a tool to explore the existing culture of an organization and to define the desired culture. It can be used to understand domineering factors in the present culture, to analyze what culture is needed to deliver a strategy, and to understand the differences. The model of the culture web, centred at the Paradigm and the different petals around it. Basically, the Cultural Web helps management to focus on key factors of the culture and their impact on strategic issues and can identify blockages to and facilitators of change in order to improve performance and competitive advantage.
A thorough evaluation of organizational culture is the cultural web model but it also has some constraints. Different people have different cultural views. Therefore, if conducted only by few managers or individuals, the evaluation may not be objective. Since the brief does not address the cultural perspective of individually but as an organization, this model is the right fit.