When people set up an organisation they will typically borrow from models
or ideals that are familiar to them. The organisation, as we explored in Chapter
2, is a subjective construct and its employees will give meaning to their
environment based on their own particular cultural programming. The
organisation is like something else they have experienced. It may be deemed
to resemble a family, or an impersonal system designed to achieve targets. It
may be likened to a vessel which is travelling somewhere, or a missile homing
in on customers and strategic objectives. Cultural preferences operating
across the dimensions described in the previous chapters influence the models
people give to organisations and the meanings they attribute to them.
This chapter explores four types of corporate culture and shows how differences
between national cultures help determine the type of corporate culture
“chosen”. Employees have a shared perception of the organisation, and what
they believe has real consequences for the corporate culture that develops.
Different corporate cultures
Organisational culture is shaped not only by technologies and markets, but
by the cultural preferences of leaders and employees. Some international
companies have European, Asian, American or Middle Eastern subsidiaries
which would be unrecognisable as the same company save for their logo
and reporting procedures. Often these are fundamentally different in the
logic of their structure and the meanings they bring to shared activity.
Three aspects of organisational structure are especially important in
determining corporate culture.
1. The general relationship between employees and their organisation.
2. The vertical or hierarchical system of authority defining superiors and
subordinates.
3. The general views of employees about the organisation’s destiny, purpose
and goals and their places in this.
Thus far we have distinguished cultures along single dimensions;
universalism-particularism, for example, and individualism-communitarianism.
In looking at organisations we need to think in two dimensions,
generating four quadrants. The dimensions we use to distinguish different
corporate cultures are equality-hierarchy and orientation to the person-
orientation to the task.
This enables us to define four types of corporate culture, which vary
considerably in how they think and learn, how they change and how they
motivate, reward and resolve conflicts. This is a valuable way to analyse
organisations, but it does have the risk of caricaturisation. We tend to
believe or wish that all foreigners will fit the stereotypes we have of them.
Hence in our very recognition of “types” there is a temptation to oversimplify
what is really quite complex.
The four types can be described as follows.
1 The family
2 The Eiffel Tower
3 The guided missile
4 The incubator
These four metaphors illustrate the relationship of employees to their
notion of the organisation. Figure 11.1 summarises the images these
organisations project.
Each of these types of corporate culture are “ideal types”. In practice
the types are mixed or overlaid with one culture dominating. This separation,
though, is useful for exploring the basis of each type in terms of how
employees learn, change, resolve conflicts, reward, motivate and so on.
Why, for example, do norms and procedures which seem to work so well in
one culture lose their effectiveness in another?
The family culture
I use the metaphor of family for the culture which is at the same time personal,
with close face-to-face relationships, but also hierarchical, in the
sense that the “father” of a family has experience and authority greatly
exceeding those of his “children”, especially where these are young. The
result is a power-oriented corporate culture in which the leader is
regarded as a caring father who knows better than his subordinates what
should be done and what is good for them. Rather than being threatening,
this type of power is essentially intimate and (hopefully) benign. The work
of the corporation in this type of culture is usually carried forward in an
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159
Figure 11.1 Corporate images
atmosphere that in many respects mimics the home.
The Japanese recreate within the corporation aspects of the traditional
family. The major business virtue is amae, a kind of love between persons of
differing rank, with indulgence shown to the younger and respect reciprocated
to the elder. The idea is always to do more than a contract or agreement
obliges you to. The idealised relationship is sempai-kokai, that
between an older and younger brother. Promotion by age means that the
older person will typically be in charge. The relationship to the corporation
is long-term and devoted.
A large part of the reason for working, performing well and resolving
conflict in this corporate culture is the pleasure derived from such relationships.
To please your superior (or elder brother) is a reward in itself.
While this affection may or may not be visible to outsiders (the Japanese,
for example, are very restrained emotionally) it is nevertheless there,
whether subdued in a Japanese-style, or conveyed unmistakably by voice,
face and bodily gesture, Italian-style. The leader of the family-style culture
weaves the pattern, sets the tone, models the appropriate posture for the
corporation and expects subordinates to be “on the same wavelength”,
knowing intuitively what is required; conversely, the leader may
empathise with the subordinates.
At its best the power-oriented family culture exercises power through
its members acting with one accord. Power is not necessarily over them,
although it may be. The main sanction is loss of affection and place in the
NATIONAL CULTURES AND CORPORATE CULTURE
160
family. Pressure is moral and social rather than financial or legal. Many
corporations with family-style cultures are from nations which industrialised
late: Greece, Italy, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, Spain. Where the
transition from feudalism to industrialism was rapid, many feudal traditions
remain.
Family-style corporate cultures tend to be high context (see Chapter
7), a term which refers to the sheer amount of information and cultural
content taken for granted by members. The more in-jokes there are, the
more family stories, traditions, customs and associations, the higher the
context and the harder it is for outsiders to feel that they belong or to
know how to behave appropriately. Such cultures exclude strangers without
necessarily wishing to do so and communicate in codes which only
members understand.
Relationships tend to be diffuse (see Chapter 7). The “father” or “elder
brother” is influential in all situations, whether they have knowledge of
the problem or not, whether an event occurs at work, in the canteen or on
the way home, and even if someone else present is better qualified. The
general happiness and welfare of all employees is regarded as the concern
of the family-type corporation, which worries about their housing, the size
of their families and whether their wages are sufficient for them to live
well. The corporation may assist in these areas.
Power and differential status are seen as “natural”, a characteristic of
the leaders themselves and not related to the tasks they succeed or fail in
doing, any more than a parent ceases to be a parent by neglecting certain
duties. Above the power of the leader may be that of the state, the political
system, the society or God. Power is political in the sense of being broadly
ordained by authorities, rather than originating in roles to be filled or
tasks to be performed. This does not mean that those in power are
unskilled or cannot do their jobs; it means that for such an organisation to
perform well the requisite knowledge and skills must be brought to the
power centres, thereby justifying the existing structure. Take the following
testimony by a British manager.
“In Italy I was introduced to my counterpart, the head of applications
engineering. I asked him about his organisation, his department and the
kind of work they were engaged in. Within minutes he had given me a
dozen names and his personal estimate of their political influence, their
proximity to power and their tastes, preferences and opinions. He said
almost nothing about either their knowledge, their skills or their
performance. As far as I could tell, they had no specific functions, or if
they had my informant was ignorant of them. I was amazed. There
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seemed to be no conception of the tasks that had to be done or their
challenge and complexity.”
It did not occur to the British manager that this “family model” is capable
of processing complexity without necessarily seeing itself as a functional
instrument to this end. The authority in the family model is
unchallengeable in the sense that it is not seen to depend on tasks performed
but on status ascribed. A major issue becomes that of getting the
top people to notice, comprehend and act. If older people have more
authority, then they must be briefed thoroughly and supported loyally in
order to fulfil the status attributed to them. The culture works to justify
its own initial suppositions.
In our own research, we tested to what extent managers from different
cultures saw their leaders “as a kind of father” or to what extent they
thought the leader “got the job done”. The results are shown in Figure
11.2, where we see one of the widest ranges of national variances of
response, and a marked grouping of Asian countries towards the top of the
chart. Another question asked of managers in the process of this research
was to think of the company they work for in terms of a triangle, and to
pick the one on the diagram (Figure 11.3) which best represents it. The
steepest triangle scores five points and so on down to one.
The scores of nations where the leader is seen as a father (Figure 11.2)
correlate closely with the steepness of the triangles in Figure 11.3. The
familial cultures of Turkey, Venezuela and several Asian countries have
the steepest hierarchies; the image combines attachment to subordination
with relative permanence of employment. Nearly all of these are also to be
found in the top third of Figure 11.2.
Family cultures at their least effective drain the energies and loyalties of
subordinates to buoy up the leader, who literally floats on seas of adoration.
Leaders get their sense of power and confidence from their followers, their
charisma fuelled by credulity and by seemingly childlike faith. Yet skilful
leaders of such cultures can also catalyse and multiply energies and appeal
to the deepest feelings and aspirations of their subordinates. They avoid the
depersonalisation of management by objectives; management by subjectives
works better. They resemble the leaders of movements aiming to emancipate,
reform, reclaim and enlighten both their members and society, like the
American civil rights movement; such movements also are essentially family-
type structures, resocialising members in new forms of conduct.
Family cultures have difficulty with project group organisation or
matrix-type authority structures, since here authority is divided. Your
function has one boss and your project another, so how can you give undiNATIONAL
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Figure 11.2 What makes a good manager?
Percentage of respondents opting to be left alone to get the job done
Egypt
Oman
Singapore
Venezuela
Nepal
Hong Kong
(east) Germany
Serbia
Philippines
Kuwait
Romania
Burkina Faso
Indonesia
Russia
Nigeria
China
UAE
Turkey
Hungary
Malaysia
Ireland
Czech Republic
Thailand
Bulgaria
Portugal
Japan
Spain
Sweden
Argentina
Poland
Brazil
Greece
Pakistan
Austria
Belgium
Italy
UK
South Africa
Uruguay
Mexico
Netherlands
Ethiopia
Curacac
USA
Finland
Denmark
Norway
Germany
France
Switzerland
Canada
Australia
0 20 40 60 80 100
% 0 20 40 60 80 100
32
35
38
41
43
45
46
47
47
47
48
48
52
53
56
57
57
62
62
63
63
64
67
67
68
69
71
73
73
74
74
75
75
75
76
77
78
80
80
80
81
81
81
83
85
87
87
87
89
92
95
97
NATIONAL CULTURES AND CORPORATE CULTURE
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Figure 11.3 Company triangles
vided loyalty to either? Another problem is that the claims of genuine
families may intrude. If someone is your brother or cousin they are
already related to your family back home and should therefore find it easier
to relate closely to you at work. It follows that, where a role or project
culture might see nepotism as corruption and a conflict of interest, a family
culture could see it as reinforcing its current norms. A person connected
to your family at home and at work has one more reason not to
cheat you. Families tend to be strong where universalism is weak.
A Dutch delegation was shocked and surprised when the Brazilian
owner of a large manufacturing company introduced his relatively junior
accountant as the key co-ordinator of a $15m joint venture. The Dutch
were puzzled as to why a recently qualified accountant had been given
such weighty responsibilities, including the receipt of their own money.
The Brazilians pointed out that this young man was the best possible
choice among 1,200 employees since he was the nephew of the owner.
Who could be more trustworthy than that? Instead of complaining, the
Dutch should consider themselves lucky that he was available.
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164
The eldest child
Quite often employees in family cultures will behave like “the eldest child”
left in charge of the family while their parents are out, but relinquishing
that authority as soon as a “parent” returns. The American manager of a
plant in Miami, Florida, found this relationship with his Venezuelan second-
in-command. The plant processed and packaged PVC. The process
required high standards of quality control. The product had to be mixed in
exactly the correct proportions or it was dangerous. Irregularity in mixing
and blending had to be reported immediately it occurred and the line concerned
closed down at once, or unsaleable product would accumulate. A
decision to shut down was an expert one requiring detailed knowledge.
Even a delay of minutes was extremely costly. It was better on the whole to
shut down prematurely than to shut down too late.
The Venezuelan deputy knew very well when the product was satisfactory
and when it was not. When his manager was away from the plant
and he was in charge, he brought any line whose quality was failing to an
immediate halt. His judgment was both fast and accurate. When the manager
was there, however, he would look for him, report what was happening
and get a decision. In the time it took to do that, considerable product
was wasted. However many times he was told to act on his own, that his
judgment was respected and that his decision would be upheld, he always
reverted to his original practice.
This was a simple case of a clash between the task orientation assumed by
the American and the family orientation of the Venezuelan. The American
had delegated the job of controlling the quality of PVC production. As he saw it
this was now his deputy’s responsibility, whether he himself was in his office
or away. It was required by the necessity of the process. But for the deputy, his
authority grew when he was left in charge and shrank the moment his “parent”
returned. Decisions should be taken by the most authoritative person
present. He would no more usurp the authority of his parents once they
returned home than would any child left temporarily in charge.
Some well-known research by Inzerilli and Laurent,1 an Italian and a
French researcher, showed the much higher appeal among Italian,
French and Japanese managers of the “manager who knows everything”.
This was on the basis of posing the question: “Is it important for a manager
to have at hand precise answers to most of the questions raised by
subordinates?” We all know that in the complexity of modern conditions it
is becoming harder for managers to know even part of what their subordinates
know as a group. Yet the supposition that your manager does know
everything may require you to discuss everything with him, thus encouraging
the upward movement of information to the apex of the organisaNATIONAL
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tion, a process that contributes to learning. We must beware, therefore, of
dismissing the family metaphor as primitive, pretentious or feudal. Its intimacies
can process complex information effectively, and wanting your
“father” to know a great deal may have more desirable results than neither
expecting nor wanting your boss to know very much. A visionary
leader who mobilises his or her employees around superordinate goals
needs their trust, their faith and their knowledge. The family model can
often supply all three.
The results of the question posed in Chapter 7 on whether a company is
responsible for providing housing (see Figure 7.6) also show those nations
in which the family is a natural model. In these cultures there is almost no
boundary for the organisation’s responsibilities to the people in its employ.
These even extend to where and how they are housed. Japanese employers
make it their business as to whether you are married, how many children
you have and accordingly how much more you need to be paid. The company
may help you find housing, help get your children into schools, offer
you consumer products at reduced prices, make recreational facilities
available and even encourage you to take vacations with work colleagues.
The belief is that the more the company does for your family the
more your family will wish its breadwinner to do for the company.
Thinking, learning and change
The family corporate culture is more interested in intuitive than in rational
knowledge, more concerned with the development of people than with
their deployment or utilisation. Personal knowledge of another is rated
above empirical knowledge about him or her. Knowing is less hypothetical
and deductive, more by trial and error. Conversations are preferred to
research questionnaires and insights to objective data. Who is doing
something is more important than what is being done. If you invite the
Japanese to a meeting they will want to know who will be there before specific
details about the agenda.
Change in the power-oriented family model is essentially political, getting
key actors to modify policies. Among favourite devices are new
visions, charismatic appeals, inspiring goals and directions, and more
authentic relationships with significant people. Bottom-up change is
unlikely unless it is insurgent and seriously challenges the leaders, in
which case major concessions may be made.
Training, mentoring, coaching and apprenticeship are important
sources of personal education but these occur at the behest of the family
and do not in themselves challenge authority but rather perpetuate it.
Family-style cultures can respond quickly to changing environments that
NATIONAL CULTURES AND CORPORATE CULTURE
166
affect their power. Their political antennae are often sharp.
A Dutch manager delegated to initiate change in the French subsidiary
of a Dutch group described to us how impressed he was at the precision
and intelligence of the French managers’ response to his proposals. He
returned three months later to find that nothing had happened. He had
failed to realise that it was also necessary to change the management
team; the strategic proposals had simply been a front behind which the
family continued to operate as before.
Motivating, rewarding and resolving conflict
Because family members enjoy their relationships they may be motivated
more by praise and appreciation than by money. Pay-for-performance
rarely sits well with them, or any motivation that threatens family bonds.
They tend to “socialise risk” among their members and can operate in
uncertain environments quite well. Their major weakness occurs when
intra-family conflicts block necessary change.
Resolving conflict often depends on the skill of a leader. Criticisms are
seldom voiced publicly; if they are the family is in turmoil. Negative feedback
is indirect and sometimes confined to special “licensed” occasions.
(In Japan you can criticise your boss while drinking his booze.) Care is
taken to avoid loss of face by prominent family members since these are
points of coherence for the whole group. The family model gives low priority
to efficiency (doing things right) but high priority to effectiveness
(doing the right things).
The Eiffel Tower culture
In the western world a bureaucratic division of labour with various roles
and functions is prescribed in advance. These allocations are co-ordinated
at the top by a hierarchy. If each role is acted out as envisaged by the system
then tasks will be completed as planned. One supervisor can oversee
the completion of several tasks; one manager can oversee the job of several
supervisors; and so on up the hierarchy.
We have chosen the Eiffel Tower in Paris to symbolise this cultural type
because it is steep, symmetrical, narrow at the top and broad at the base,
stable, rigid and robust. Like the formal bureaucracy for which it stands, it
is very much a symbol of the machine age. Its structure, too, is more
important than its function.
Its hierarchy is very different from that of the family. Each higher level
has a clear and demonstrable function of holding together the levels
beneath it. You obey the boss because it is his or her role to instruct you.
NATIONAL CULTURES AND CORPORATE CULTURE
167
The rational purpose of the corporation is conveyed to you through him.
He has legal authority to tell you what to do and your contract of service,
overtly or implicitly, obliges you to work according to his instructions. If
you and other subordinates did not do so the system could not function.
The boss in the Eiffel Tower is only incidentally a person. Essentially he
or she is a role. Were he to drop dead tomorrow, someone else would
replace him and it would make no difference to your duties or to the
organisation’s reason for being. His successor might of course be more or
less unpleasant, or interpret the role slightly differently, but that is
marginal. Effectively the job is defined and the discharge of it evaluated
according to that definition. Very little is left to chance or the idiosyncrasies
of individuals.
It follows that authority stems from occupancy of the role. If you meet
the boss on the golf course, you have no obligation to let him play through
and he probably would not expect it. Relationships are specific (see Chapter
7) and status is ascribed (see Chapter 8) and stays behind at the office.
This is not, however, a personal ascription of status as we see it in the family.
Status in the Eiffel Tower is ascribed to the role. This makes it impossible
to challenge. Thus bureaucracy in the Eiffel Tower is a depersonalised,
rational-legal system in which everyone is subordinate to local rules and
those rules prescribe a hierarchy to uphold and enforce them. The boss is
powerful only because the rules sanction him or her to act.
Careers in Eiffel Tower companies are much assisted by professional
qualifications. At the top of German and Austrian companies, which are
typically Eiffel Tower models, the titles of professor or doctor are common
on office doors. This is extremely rare in the USA.
Almost everything the family culture accepts the Eiffel Tower rejects.
Personal relationships are likely to warp judgments, create favourites,
multiply exceptions to the rules and obscure clear boundaries between
roles and responsibilities. You cannot evaluate your subordinate’s performance
in a role if you grow fond of him or her or need their personal loyalty
for yourself. The organisation’s purpose is logically separate from
your personal need for power or affection. Such needs are distractions,
biases and intrusions by personal agendas upon public ones.
Each role at each level of the hierarchy is described, rated for its difficulty,
complexity and responsibility, and has a salary attached to it. There
then follows a search for a person to fill it. In considering applicants for
the role the personnel department will treat everyone equally and neutrally,
will match the person’s skills and aptitudes with the job requirements
and will award the job to the best fit between role and person. The
same procedure is followed in evaluations and promotions.
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168
We tested the influence of the role culture as opposed to the more
personal culture by posing the following dilemma to managers.
Two managers talk about their company’s organisational structure.
A One says: “The main reason for having an organisational
structure is so that everyone knows who has authority over
whom.”
B The other says: “The main reason for having an organisational
structure is so that everyone knows how functions are allocated
and co-ordinated.”
Which one of these two ways usually best represents an
organisational structure?
Those nations most attracted to putting roles before persons, largely
North American and north-west European, opt by large majorities for B.
Here the logic of subordination is clearly rational and coordinative.
In option A it is left unspecified. The organisation legitimates
existing power differences.
The Eiffel Tower points to the goals to be achieved by the edifice, which
is relatively rigid and has difficulty pointing in different directions. If, for
example, the Eiffel Tower company needs to achieve goals inconsistent
with hierarchical co-ordinated roles, say inventing new products, then its
structure tends to impede achievement. On the other hand, it is well
designed to renew passports or check insurance claims, where the rules
are devised in advance and consistent treatment is legally required.
In one of our workshops the head of strategic planning in a major German
company gave a one-hour presentation on his company’s strategic
planning. He spent 45 minutes on how his firm was organised and the
remaining 15 on strategic issues. Over lunch I asked him why he had not
wanted to give 60 minutes to strategic issues. “But I did,” was his reply. For
him, structure was strategy.
Thinking, learning and change
The way in which people think, learn and change in the role-oriented Eiffel
Tower company is significantly different from similar processes in the
family. For employees in the Eiffel Tower, the family culture is arbitrary,
irrational, conspiratorial, cosy and corrupt. Instead of following set procedures
which everyone can understand, and having objective benchmarks
which employees agree to conform to, the family is forever shifting goal
NATIONAL CULTURES AND CORPORATE CULTURE
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Figure 11.4 The reason for organisation
Percentage of respondents opting for function rather than personality
Venezuela
Uruguay
Nepal
(east) Germany
UAE
Romania
Kuwait
Czech Republic
Singapore
Bulgaria
Poland
Oman
Japan
Russia
Hungary
Spain
Turkey
Thailand
Serbia
China
Burkina Faso
Italy
Mexico
Hong Kong
Sweden
Greece
Indonesia
Philippines
Nigeria
Brazil
India
Pakistan
Argentina
USA
Switzerland
Netherlands
Germany
Curacao
Ireland
UK
Austria
France
Egypt
Belgium
Canada
Ethiopia
Norway
Australia
Finland
Portugal
Malaysia
South Africa
Denmark
% 0 20 40 60 80 100
% 0 20 40 60 80 100
44
55
61
64
65
66
68
70
70
73
77
78
80
80
82
83
83
83
84
85
88
88
88
89
89
89
89
90
90
91
91
91
91
92
92
92
92
93
93
93
94
95
95
95
96
96
97
98
98
98
100
100
100
NATIONAL CULTURES AND CORPORATE CULTURE
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posts or suspending competitive play altogether.
Learning in the Eiffel Tower means accumulating the skills necessary
to fit a role and hopefully the additional skills to qualify for higher positions.
In Eiffel Tower companies, people or “human resources” are conceived
of as similar to capital and cash resources. People of known
qualifications can be planned, scheduled, deployed and reshuffled by skill
sets like any other physical entity. Manpower planning, assessment centres,
appraisal systems, training schemes and job rotation all have the
function of helping to classify and produce resources to fit known roles.
Change in the Eiffel Tower is effected through changing rules. With any
alteration in the company’s purpose must come changes in what employees
are formally required to do. For this reason, the culture does not adapt well
to turbulent environments. In theory, constant rule-change would be necessary
but this would in practice bewilder employees, lower morale and
obscure the distinction between rules and deviations. Change in an Eiffel
Tower culture is immensely complex and time-consuming. Manuals must
be rewritten, procedures changed, job descriptions altered, promotions
reconsidered, qualifications reassessed. “Restructuring” or “rationalisation”
tend to be dreaded words in Eiffel Tower cultures. They usually mean wholesale
firings and redundancies. Such companies resist change and when it
becomes inevitable suffer major dislocation as a consequence.
An American manager responsible for initiating change in a German
company described to me the difficulties he had had in making progress,
although the German managers had discussed the new strategy in depth
and made significant contributions to its formulation. Through informal
channels he had eventually discovered that his mistake was not having formalised
the changes to structure or job descriptions. In the absence of a
new organigram, this Eiffel Tower company was unable to change. Like the
Dutch manager above who had similar problems in dealing with a French
family company, his assumption was that once an intellectual decision had
been agreed, instant action would follow. Both these managers came from
task-oriented guided missile cultures themselves (see below).
Motivating, rewarding and resolving conflict
Employees of the Eiffel Tower are ideally precise and meticulous. They are
nervous when order and predictability is lacking. Duty is an important concept
for the role-oriented employee. It is an obligation people feel within
themselves, rather than an obligation they feel towards a specific individual.
Conflicts are seen as irrational, pathologies of orderly procedure,
offences against efficiency. Criticisms and complaints are typically channelled
and dealt with through even more rules and fact-finding procedures.
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The family and the Eiffel Tower in conflict
MCC, the company employing Mr Johnson, whose problems we have been
following throughout this book, is broadly speaking a task-oriented company,
and many of Mr Johnson’s difficulties have arisen through clashes
with colleagues whose expectations of companies are much closer to the
family model. (The final instalment of Mr Johnson’s story will be found at
the end of this chapter.) Another example of what happens when these
two models find themselves side by side is the story of Heinz, a manager
from a large German multinational, experienced and outstandingly successful,
who was selected to help a Colombian packaging material company
to get out of the red. All stakeholders, the Colombian government
included, acknowledged that modernisation and more professional management
were needed. Heinz wanted to make the factory profitable and
more efficient by introducing new production and quality standards.
The most important person in the company next to Heinz was Antonio,
a Colombian, designated to take over Heinz’s job after the German had
completed his mission. After almost a year of working in Colombia, Heinz
concluded that the activities in the factory had not improved significantly
despite his best efforts.
The following are excerpts from a consultant’s report (rewritten by
Leonel Brug) in which Heinz and Antonio were interviewed separately.
Antonio’s story. Antonio is very positive about Heinz’s technical and
organisational capabilities. The need to increase efficiency is undeniable
and the production processes still need much work. Heinz is quite right on
this score.
Antonio is, however, shocked by the way Heinz is trying to impose his
methods and ideas on the Colombians. He describes this as turning them
into robots; he is dehumanising the whole organisation.
He says Heinz seems obsessed with time and money. People hardly
count at all. He yells at workers for taking longer breaks than they should,
forgetting that the previous week they worked overtime without extra pay,
without complaint and, of course, without thanks. He does not seem to
realise that punctuality is not possible. We have people reporting for work
who walked when the bus broke down and he shouts at them as they limp
in at the gate. Antonio is amazed that they come to work at all.
There are two men who waded a river to get to work when the floods
washed the bridge away and yet Heinz still wanted to dock their pay. Antonio
refused to do this. He told Heinz: “Look, they have to want to come to work, to
be appreciated here, or absenteeism will become far higher than it already is.”
NATIONAL CULTURES AND CORPORATE CULTURE
172
Heinz’s story. Heinz explains that the factory was a real mess when he
arrived. There was no order, no procedure, no discipline and no responsibility.
He complains that Antonio is always making excuses. Everything is a
special case or an exceptional circumstance. He runs around like a wetnurse
trying to discover why the employees are unhappy or disturbed. He
is forever telling Antonio to let them stand on their own two feet.
Employees think they can turn up to work when it is convenient for
them, despite the fact that they know production cannot start until nearly
all of them arrive. They wait for things to go wrong and then act as if they
are making heroic gestures of self-sacrifice. He has told them repeatedly
that he does not need them to stay late, he just needs them to get to work
on time.
“They have more colourful excuses than a tale of the Wild West. To hear
them tell it they only come to work at all because they love us. And that
they were late because their brothers missed an appointment or some
bridge fell down or who knows what. We get ‘scenes of village life’ here
every day.”
Heinz explains that he has told Antonio that he does not want to bully
employees or harass them, he just wants to keep to agreements, deadlines
and schedules. He does not believe that is too much to ask.
In this example, it should be noted, Heinz represents a very sophisticated
Eiffel Tower culture and Antonio quite an unsophisticated family
one. In the hands of a sophisticated family culture, like many Japanese
companies, the consequences could be different. Nor are cultures necessarily
exclusive. Families can “take on” the exacting rules of Eiffel Towers
and become formidable competitors. The finest combinations lie beyond
stereotypes and simple contrasts.
The guided missile culture
The guided missile culture differs from both the family and the Eiffel Tower
by being egalitarian, but differs also from the family and resembles the
Eiffel Tower in being impersonal and task-oriented. Indeed the guided missile
culture is rather like the Eiffel Tower in flight. But while the rationale
of the Eiffel Tower culture is means, the guided missile has a rationale of
ends. Everything must be done to persevere in your strategic intent and
reach your target.
The guided missile culture is oriented to tasks, typically undertaken by
teams or project groups. It differs from the role culture in that the jobs
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members do are not fixed in advance. They must do “whatever it takes” to
complete a task, and what is needed is often unclear and may have to be
discovered.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) pioneered
the use of project groups working on space probes which resembled
guided missiles. It takes roughly 140 different kinds of engineers to build a
lunar landing module and whose contribution is crucial at exactly what
time cannot be known in advance. Because every variety of engineering
must work harmoniously with every other, the best form of synthesis
needs to be discovered in the course of working. Nor can there be any hierarchy
which claims that “A’s expertise is greater than B’s expertise”. Each
knows most about his or her part. How the whole will function needs to be
worked out with everyone’s participation. All are equals, or at least
potentially equal, since their relative contributions are not yet known.
Such groups will have leaders or co-ordinators, who are responsible for
sub and final assemblies, but these generalists may know less than specialists
in each discipline and must treat all experts with great respect. The
group is egalitarian because it might need the help of any one expert in
changing direction towards its target. The end is known but the possible
trajectories are uncertain. Missile cultures frequently draw on professionals
and are cross-disciplinary. In an advertising agency, for example, one
copywriter, one visualiser/artist, one media buyer, one commercial film
buyer and one account representative may work on a campaign yet to be
agreed by the client. All will play a part, but what part depends on the
final campaign the client prefers.
Guided missile cultures are expensive because professionals are expensive.
Groups tend to be temporary, relationships as fleeting as the project
and largely instrumental in bringing the project to a conclusion. Employees
will join other groups, for other purposes, within days or weeks and
may have multiple memberships. This culture is not affectionate or mutually
committed, but typifies the neutral cultures discussed in Chapter 6.
The ultimate criteria of human value in the guided missile culture are
how you perform and to what extent you contribute to the jointly desired
outcome. In effect, each member shares in problem-solving. The relative
contribution of any one person may not be as clear as in the Eiffel Tower
culture where each role is described and outputs can be quantified.
In practice, the guided missile culture is superimposed upon the Eiffel
Tower organisation to give it permanence and stability. This is known as
the matrix organisation. You have one (Eiffel Tower) line reporting to your
functional boss, say electrical engineering, and another (guided missile)
line of responsibility to your project head. This makes you jointly responsiNATIONAL
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ble to your engineering boss for quality engineering and to your project
leader for a viable, low-cost means of, say, auto-emissions control. The
project has to succeed and your electronics must be excellent. Two
authorities pull you in different, although reconcilable, directions.
Thinking, learning and change
The guided missile culture is cybernetic, in the sense that it homes in on
its target using feedback signals and is therefore circular rather than linear.
Yet the “missile” rarely, if ever, changes its mind about its target. Steering
is therefore corrective and conservative, not as open to new ends as to
new means.
Learning includes “getting on” with people, breaking the ice quickly,
playing the part in a team which is currently lacking, being practical
rather than theoretical and being problem-centred rather than disciplinecentred.
Appraisal is often by peers or subordinates rather than by someone
further up the hierarchy.
Change comes quickly to the guided missile culture. The target moves.
More targets appear, new groups are formed, old ones dissolve. People
who hop from group to group will often hop from job to job, so that
turnover tends to be high, and loyalties to professions and projects
are greater than loyalties to the company. The guided missile culture
is in many respects the antithesis of the family culture, in which bonds are
close and ties are of long duration and deep affection.
Motivating, rewarding and resolving conflict
Motivations tend to be intrinsic in this culture. That is, team members
get enthusiastic about, identify with and struggle towards the final product.
In the case of the Apple Macintosh, the enthusiasm was about creating
an “insanely great machine”. The product under development is the
superordinate goal for which the conflicts and animosities of team members
may be set aside. Unless there is high participation there will not be
widespread commitment. The final consensus must be broad enough to
pull in all those who work on it.
This culture tends to be individualistic since it allows for a wide variety
of differently specialised persons to work with each other on a temporary
basis. The scenery of faces keeps changing. Only the pursuit of chosen
lines of personal development is constant. The team is a vehicle for the
shared enthusiasm of its members, but is itself disposable and will be discarded
when the project ends. Members are garrulous, idiosyncratic and
intelligent, but their mutuality is a means, not an end. It is a way of enjoying
the journey. They do not need to know each other intimately and may
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avoid doing so. Management by objectives is the language spoken, and
people are paid by performance.
The incubator culture
The incubator culture is based on the existential idea that organisations
are secondary to the fulfilment of individuals. Just as “existence precedes
essence” was the motto of existential philosophers, so “existence precedes
organisation” is the notion of incubator cultures. If organisations are to be
tolerated at all, they should be there to serve as incubators for selfexpression
and self-fulfilment. The metaphor here should not be confused
with “business incubators”. (These are organisations which provide
routine maintenance and services, plant equipment, insurance, office
space and so on for embryo businesses, so that they can lower their overhead
costs during the crucial start-up phase.)
However, the logic of business and cultural incubators is quite similar.
In both cases the purpose is to free individuals from routine to more creative
activities and to minimise time spent on self-maintenance. The incubator
is both personal and egalitarian. Indeed it has almost no structure
at all and what structure it does provide is merely for personal convenience:
heat, light, word processing, coffee and so on.
The roles of other people in the incubator, however, are crucial. They
are there to confirm, criticise, develop, find resources for and help to complete
the innovative product or service. The culture acts as a sounding
board for innovative ideas and tries to respond intelligently to new initiatives.
Typical examples are start-up firms in Silicon Valley, California, in
Silicon Glen in Scotland and on Route 128 around Boston. The companies
are usually entrepreneurial or founded by a creative team that quit a
larger employer just before the pay-off. Being individualist they are not
constrained by organisational loyalties and may deliberately “free ride”
until their eggs are close to hatching. In this way larger organisations find
themselves successively undermined.
Cultural incubators are not only small innovative companies. They can
be doctors in group practice, legal partners, some consultants, chartered
surveyors, or any group of professionals who work mostly alone but like to
share resources while comparing experiences. Some writers see the incubator
as the organisational wave of the future. Others see the decline of Silicon
Valley as evidence that this culture cannot survive maturity and is
but a temporary phase in starting up an organisation from an ad hoc
basis. Others point to the rarity of incubator cultures outside the “enclaves
of individualism” in the USA, the UK and the English-speaking world.
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176
Just as incubators have minimal structure, so they also have minimal
hierarchy. Such authority as individuals do command is strictly personal,
the exciting nature of their ideas and the inspiration of their vision leading
others to work with them.
Incubators often, if not always, operate in an environment of intense
emotional commitment. However, this commitment is less towards people
per se than to the world-changing, society-redeeming nature of the work
being undertaken. The personal computer will bring “power to the person”,
gene-splicing could save crops, save lives, rescue the economy and represents
an odyssey into the unknown, wherein “the journey is the reward”.
Incubator cultures enjoy the process of creating and innovating.
Because of close relationships, shared enthusiasms and superordinate
goals, the incubator at its best can be ruthlessly honest, effective, nurturant,
therapeutic and exciting, depending as it does on face-to-face relationships
and working intimacies. Because the association is voluntary,
often underfunded and fuelled largely by hope and idealism, it can be the
most significant and intense experience of a lifetime. But this is very hard
to repeat or sustain, since the project no sooner succeeds than strangers
must be hired and the founders’ special relationships are lost. Incubators
are typically limited in size by the leaders’ “span of control”; it becomes
hard to communicate spontaneously and informally with more than
75-100 people.
Thinking, learning and change
Change in the incubator can be fast and spontaneous where the members are
attuned to each other. Roger Harrison2 has likened the process to an improvising
jazz band, in which a self-elected leader tries something new and the
band follows if it likes the theme and ignores the theme if it does not. All participants
are on the same wavelength, empathically searching together for a
solution to the shared problem. But because a customer has not defined any
target, the problem itself is open to redefinition and the solution being
searched for is typically generic, aimed at a universe of applications.
American start-up companies with incubator cultures rarely survive
the maturing of their products and their markets. This culture learns to
create but not to survive altered patterns of demand. The “great
designers” of the novel products continue to be the heroes of the company
long after the focus has shifted to customer service and to marketing.
Motivating, rewarding and resolving conflict
Motivation is often wholehearted, intrinsic and intense with individuals
working “70 hours a week and loving it” as the T-shirts at Apple ComNATIONAL
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177
puter used to read in its earlier days. There is competition to contribute to
the emerging shape of something new. Everyone wants to get his or her
“hands on”. There is scant concern for personal security and few wish to
profit or have power apart from the unfolding creative process. If the
whole succeeds there will be plenty for everyone. If it does not, the incubator
itself will be gone. In contrast to the family culture, leadership in the
incubator is achieved, not ascribed. You follow those whose progress
most impresses you and whose ideas work. Power plays that impede group
achievement will be reviled. Conflict is resolved either by splitting up or by
trying the proposed alternatives to see which works best.
Which countries prefer which corporate cultures
As we have already said, these “pure types” seldom exist. In practice the
types are mixed or overlaid with one culture dominating. Nevertheless in
different national cultures one or more of these types clearly dominate the
corporate scene, and if we list the main characteristics of the four types it
becomes easy to refer back to the national cultural dimensions discussed
in the preceding chapters. The following table shows how in the four models
employees relate differently, have different views of authority, think,
learn and change in different ways, and are motivated by different
rewards, while criticism and conflict resolution are variously handled.
The original 79-item questionnaire used to compile our main database
was not aimed at measuring the four corporate cultures, although it incidentally
included the questions illuminating family and Eiffel Tower
approaches described above (with results shown in Figures 11.2-4). Five
years ago, however, United Notions — the centre for intellectual business
studies — decided to start compiling a new database of corporate culture,
using a similar approach. Sixteen questions were devised which deal with
general concepts of egalitarianism versus hierarchy, degrees of formality,
different forms of conflict resolution, learning, and so on. (Examples of
these are in Appendix 2.) Respondents are asked to choose between four
possible descriptions of their company, which are geared respectively to
the power-priority of the family, the role-dominance of the Eiffel Tower, the
task-orientation of the guided missile and the person-orientation of the
incubator. This work is fairly new; the database currently totals 13,000
and we have significant samples for 42 countries. These show very
marked distinctions. Figure 11.5 shows the results of totalling the
responses to the whole questionnaire. This puts the highest scores for
guided missile companies in the USA and the UK, and the highest for family
companies in France and Spain. Sweden scores highest for incubators
and Germany for Eiffel Towers.
The reader, however, should interpret this cautiously. Smaller companies
wherever located are more likely to take the family and incubator
forms. Large companies needing structure to cohere are likely to choose
Eiffel Tower or guided missile forms. Our database has relatively few
respondents from smaller companies, so that these are under-represented.
In France, for example, smaller companies tend to be family and larger
companies Eiffel Tower. In the USA guided missile companies may dominate
among large corporations, but the archetypal incubators are to be
found in Silicon Valley, as they are in the UK in Silicon Glen.
Figure 11.5 National patterns of corporate culture
SUMMARY
We have defined four broad types of corporate culture, which are closely
related to the national differences described in earlier chapters. Just as
national cultures conflict, leading to mutual incomprehension and mistrust,
so corporate cultures collide. Attempts to “dice” the family with a
matrix can cause rage and consternation. Getting cosy with subordinates
in the Eiffel Tower could be seen as a potentially improper advance. Asking
to be put in a group with a special friend is a subversive act in the guided
missile culture. Calling your boss “buddy” and slapping him or her on the
back will get you thrown from the Eiffel Tower, while suggesting in an
incubator that everyone fill out time-sheets will be greeted with cat-calls.
NATIONAL CULTURES AND CORPORATE CULTURE
180
(If you really want to discover norms, break them; reading this chapter is
intended as a less painful alternative.)
Yet the types exist and must be respected. Really successful businesses
borrow from all types and ceaselessly struggle to reconcile them. We turn
to this process in the last chapter. First, however, we should say goodbye to
Mr Johnson.
Back in St Louis at the MCC management meeting Mr Johnson reported on the
introduction of pay-for-performance. It had been resisted widely, and where it
had been tried, in parts of southern Europe, the Middle East and Asia, early
results showed it had failed. The meeting listened in silence. The atmosphere
was distinctly cool. “Well,” said the CEO, “how do you plan to cope with these
problems, Bill? I’m sure we don’t need the HR function to tell us that there are
a lot of different people and opinions in the world.”
Johnson had by now decided that he had nothing to lose, so he voiced a
concern he had felt for many months. “I realise we make machines, but I sometimes
ask myself if we are letting the metaphor run away with the organisation.
These are people, not microprocessors or integrated circuits, which can be
replaced if they don’t work.” “I wish we could operate more like a computer,”
interrupted the finance manager. “We hire quality people to do as we tell
them, and function in ways they are trained. Either they do this or we get
somebody else. What’s wrong with that?”
The CEO was trying to calm things down. “I have to disagree there,” he said.
“I see this company as more of an organism. If you go to Barcelona and chop
off heads, don’t be surprised if the body dies. If we take out some subsidiary’s
right hand we can’t expect it to work well in future. What I can’t understand is
why Bill can’t get them to see that we’re all one organism and that the hands
and feet can’t go off in all directions.”
Suddenly all the exasperations of the last few months came to the surface.
For a moment Johnson had thought that the CEO was supporting him, but it
was the same old message: get the whole world to march in step with us.
“What I’ve been through in the last eight months is about as far from a
smoothly running computer or a living organism as you could get. I’ll tell you
what it’s really like, because I was reading the story to my kids. It’s like that crazy
croquet game in Alice in Wonderland where she has to play with a flamingo as a
mallet, waiters bending over as hoops and hedgehogs as balls. The flamingo twists
its head round to look at Alice, the hoops wander off and the balls crawl away.
The result is chaos.
Other cultures aren’t part of a machine, or the organs of a supranational
body. They’re different animals, all with logic of their own. If we asked them
what game they are playing, and got them to explain the rules, we might
discover when we aren’t holding a mallet at all, or even get the hedgehog to
go in the right direction.”
Was Mr Johnson promoted, or given the job of overseeing the welfare of
MCC pensioners? My guess is that he is running a small but fast growing
consultancy somewhere, specialising in cross-cultural management.
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