Organisational Cuture And Decision Making



Organisational Cuture And Decision Making

INTRODUCTION

The paper illustrates how organizational culture can stifle effective problem solving and decision making. In the organization in question this had critical implications for quality, staff retention and organizational change.

Statement of aim/s of essay

This paper investigates how effective problem solving within an organization is stifled by a shared inability to generate and embrace novel solutions. After contextualizing this research effort the article explores the “ethnographic” methodology developed to explicate the culture of the organization in question. Two major organizational problems are illustrated together with managers' attempts to solve them. A rather short-sighted problem-solving and decision-making process is encountered which, it is argued, can best be explained by adopting a cultural perspective. The culture of the organization stifled managerial problem-solving capabilities. Consequently, an alternative culture is suggested, adoption of which would significantly improve problem solving, and hence effectiveness, in the organization.

Scope of essay identified

This paper recognizes that managerial problem-solving and decision-making processes are driven by non-rational cultural forces. Consequently, it questions the traditional logical/rational problem-solving model. It is difficult to imagine that any organizational activity which involves human interaction, discussion and negotiation, together with cultural and political mediation, and which is subjected to the vagaries of individual cognition and perception, could ever be considered to be “rational”. (Lyles, 1992)The cultural perspective merely recognizes this fact and attempts to offer a fresh, more realistic insight into managerial problem solving. The article also provides further substantive evidence of the obstacles which restrain change in work practices in the public sector.

Ethnography: Entering an Unfamiliar Cultural Terrain

The research utilized an ethnographic methodology which is well suited to the investigation of organizational cultures. The techniques described below, now widely used in management research, were largely borrowed from social anthropology where they were developed to penetrate and explicate unfamiliar cultures. (Dessler, 1995) Ethnography involves an interpretative process where data, frequently in the form of discourse, are analysed in order to elicit underlying features, concepts or theories regarding the particular social community being studied. (Sackmann, 1991)

After gaining the trust of senior management in the agency, the first step in the data-gathering phase was to conduct a “rap session”[1] with junior managers. The purpose was to elicit suitable organizational problems and related issues which could be used to ensure lively and fluent discourse from subsequent interviewees. Thereafter the research concentrated on elite purposive sampling. Taped interviews were conducted with all members of the senior management group, comprising the chief executive and department and functional area heads, each of whom one might expect to play a major role in strategic problem resolution and have an influence on culture and its communication throughout the organization. A dozen influential middle managers, from all divisions of the agency, were also a useful source of data. (Bate, 1990)

The Cultural Infrastructure

Use of the term “culture” suggests a particular kind of interpretive framework for understanding organizational processes. The local cultural infrastructure comprises a complex interrelated array of shared cognitive knowledge structures. These have variously been referred to as ...