How can high morale breed stagnation

Some organizations hold that a culture of success is one in which things must always run smoothly, with minimal or no mistakes. As such, they adopt a more divisive black-and-white approach to defining success and failure. This approach hinders employees as well as organizational development.

Employees become risk-averse, face anxiety and fear, and want to hide their mistakes, resulting in a stagnant culture with low employee engagement and poor morale as well as high turnover and significant absenteeism. Organizations would be wise to accept and address failures at certain levels, learn from them, and move on without demoralizing and punishing employees.

Brenda Rigney, vice president of People Operations at Earls Restaurants, which has 65 locations in Canada and the United States, sees retention as the ultimate workforce problem. Turnover often arises from a culture where, rather than being tolerated, failure results in employee discipline. Compliance prevails over empowerment. She notes that employers must move to transform this type of culture before it begins to weaken innovation and breed mistakes, theft, fraud and negative employer branding.

Organizations that adopt failure into their cultures value processes more than—or as much as—end results. Within such organizations, leaders and managers:. It could involve mentoring new employees, holding debriefing sessions or providing training in a specific area where the failure occurred.

Most important, failure should be explored and seen as an opportunity for everyone to learn and benefit. A culture that embraces failure promotes ongoing feedback, open communication channels and good listening skills. This way, employees feel able to approach their supervisors or managers before a minor mistake leads to a major disaster.

We teach people how they can manage their business and encourage them to try new initiatives to drive their business. We have great stories, such as a dishwasher creating a new system to organize cutlery that increased productivity of our front-house team. They may instill the fear of being singled out or targeted, the fear of being ridiculed by co-workers or the fear that your career will be ruined, write the authors.

Working in a constant state of fear is extremely damaging, according to healthcare experts, and may leave you feeling incapacitated. Studies show that fear can impair your decision-making because it breeds uncertainty and it leaves you vulnerable to making impulsive reactions.

Solution: Luckily, there are many ways to tackle fear , says life coach and motivational speaker Adam Smith. If you fear failure in your career, "identify the things you can control," he says. This daily pressure can lead to mental fatigue, which neuroscientists say impairs your cognitive performance and reduces your motivation to get things done. Mental fatigue also makes it harder to focus on tasks at hand, resulting in decreased productivity and work efficiency. To get to this state, she advises that you do things that make you feel positive, detach from work when you're not working and remember the big picture.

Life in the toxic zone can make you feel stagnant, especially if your boss is passing you over for promotions or piling mundane work on your desk. Boredom, in turn, makes you less focused at work and decreases your level of engagement.

There is nothing wrong with being specific. However, it becomes poor leadership when it causes the leader to completely ignore the contribution of some team members and favor others instead. They are simply acting on their biases, and the resulting actions are skewed in a particular direction. In the worst case, the leader knows exactly what they are doing but continues to do it anyway.

This is the most obvious sign of a bad leader. Bad leaders will often scold their employees for their mistakes in public and even criticize them for aspects of their personality or appearance, rather than the work that they are doing. Employees who find themselves working in an office where the leader is a bully will often feel demoralized and leave as soon as they get an opportunity. Productivity will go down, and the bottom line will eventually follow.

In the worst cases, the negative environment can cause extreme stress in employees and lead to negative psychological issues. Nicky is a business writer with nearly two decades of hands-on and publishing experience. Women on Writing. She also studied business in college. References Training Mag: Leader Problem?

Or Leadership Problem? The levers creating strong cultures may therefore lead to both effectiveness and. Strong cultures, on one hand, can lead an organization to the "success breeds failure" syndrome in which organizations refuse, or are unable, to adapt to changing environmental demands.

IBM's lingering overreliance on mainframe computer business is a well-known example. On the other hand, strong cultures also can lead organizations to a "success breeds success" situation in which a unique market niche and "brand identity" become associated with the organization because of its strong culture.

Organizations change as their environment, personnel, circumstances, and missions change. Culture serves not merely to slow the rate of change but also to keep change focused and in accord with current organizational operation; in strong cultures, change must be accommodated in order to avoid disruption and discontinuity. Therein lies the problem: those cultures most resistant to change, the strong ones, are precisely those in organizations in which culture is most influential in the organization's functioning.

How can managers actually produce change in organizations with strong cultures? Particular events sometimes occur that provide a window of opportunity for managing cultural change.

Consider, for example, a telecommunications company located in a downtown business district. For a variety of financial and logistical reasons, the firm moved its entire operation to an outlying suburban area.

The physical structure of the workplace changed. The balance of influence of subsections of the organization changed, e. Most important, there was a dramatic shift in personnel. Many employees who had relied on public transportation to get to the old central-city workplace were faced with a difficult commute to the suburbs. Others chose not to make the move and to resign rather than add hours to travel time and disrupt daily patterns of household organization. These difficulties affected employees across the organization, from front-line workers to supervisors to middle management.

The move itself was accompanied by a pervasive and unprecedented turnover in personnel. The use of levers to change culture was clearly at work in this case. Selection entered into the recruitment of a new workforce and socialization after they were recruited.

The new site provided a vehicle for altering cultural forms as well, such as a new dress code for the suburbs, a new arrangement for lunches and breaks, and so forth. Subcultures were deconstructed and reassembled by the new physical arrangement of the move.

Topology may not be destiny, but it was a major force in who talked to whom and how friendships and cohesive subunits formed Festinger et al. However, such opportunities do not always arise as needed. Thus, an enduring problem for managers is how to employ cultural levers when such drastic environmental changes do not aid in moving organizational cultures in desired directions.

Unlike redesigning organizational structure or forming an organizational alliance, managing culture is fraught with ambiguity and uncertainty. Because culture is collective, emotional, historical, symbolic, dynamic, fuzzy—as well as largely unrecognized—it is difficult to pinpoint just what is to be managed or how. Well-known examples of culture management published both in the popular press and in the scholarly literature indicate that culture management takes at least three forms: creating culture purposely in a new organization, remodeling or reorienting an existing culture in an organization, and strengthening an organization's culture in the face of threats or pressures to change.

Each of these three representations of culture management present its own challenges and issues as managers attempt to address them.

When new organizations form, cultures are usually created within them. Cultures have a tendency to develop through predictable stages in the early part of an organization's life cycle, regardless of managerial intervention. Empirical research has been carried out in this area on government agencies, health care organizations, educational organizations, and the computer industry see Cameron and Whetten, ; Cameron and Quinn, , for reviews of the extensive research available.

In the earliest stages of development, organizations tend to be dominated by an "adhocratic" culture—characterized by an absence of formal structure, creativity and entrepreneurship, fluid and nonbureaucratic methods, and an emphasis on individuality, freedom, and flexibility among employees.

Over time, organizations supplement that orientation with a clan culture—a family feeling, a strong sense of belonging and dedication, personal identification with the organization, and a strong missionary-like zeal. Organizational expansion eventually produces the need to emphasize structure, standard procedures, and control—that is, a hierarchy-focused culture. Such a shift makes members feel that the organization has lost the friendly, personal feeling that once characterized the workplace, and the focus on reduction of deviation, standardization, and restraint may give rise to escalating resentment or rebellion.

The fourth cultural shift is to a market-focused culture—a focus on competitiveness, achieving results, aggressiveness in customer relations, elaboration of structure, and an emphasis on external interactions. Market cultures. These life-cycle shifts in cultural orientation notwithstanding, forceful managers can have a powerful impact on the formation of a dominant culture that persists in their organizations.

Almost four generations later, for example, IBM still reflects the culture created by founder Thomas Watson. Polaroid still reflects the culture created by Edwin Land, and Sony still reflects the culture created by Akio Morita. Among the mechanisms by which these powerful cultures were created are:. These six levers are neither comprehensive nor unique to cultural formation, of course, but they are among the social mechanisms managers can initiate and largely control.

It is important note that there may be a liability associated with strong cultures. In the airline industry, for example, People Express Airlines effectively used cultural levers to develop a strong culture. It was patterned after the values of Don Burr, its founder and chief executive officer. Burr's explicit purpose was to form an airline that would be the model of customer concern, people sensitivity, and teamwork. People Express achieved almost unbelievably successful results during its first five years of existence, setting world records for income and profitability.

However, a change in environmental demands brought about by the airline's purchase of Frontier Airlines, a unionized company, led to the rather swift demise of both companies.

The strong culture of People Express was simply unable to adjust to the requirements of a radically different environment. Once an organization's culture is formed, tremendous pressure exists for it to persist. To change culture means that organization members become subject to ambiguity, disrupted patterns of interaction, a new reinforcement structure, different allocation procedures, and a different set of. Often the more successful the organization, the more difficult the change.

That said, cultural change is sometimes necessary for organizational survival. A lack of fit may develop between the organization's culture and the demands of the competitive environment, or between the organization's culture and the demands of customers, or between the organization's culture and the style or personality of new leaders, or between the organization's culture and the cultures of other organizations with which alliances have been formed. In other words, mismatches may create conditions in which culture change is necessary for the organization to survive.

One well-known example of major culture change involved the U. Postal Service Biggart, , :. When Winton Blount was named postmaster general in , he was charged with making the post office pay its own way.

To do so he needed to discredit and destroy the old ideologies of dependency on Congress and of providing "service, service at all costs. To signal the change of political status, the year-old name of the post office was changed. A new logo, new typeface for all publications, and new postal colors were put in place. Nationwide birthday parties were held in every post office in the country, and a new stamp was printed with the new logo to commemorate the event.

Post Office culture with a new U. Postal Service culture typified by more innovation and flexibility, service orientation, and efficiency. Another example is the U. Army, whose culture changed not so much by the actions of a single leader but by a new policy instituted by Congress that replaced the former draft-based Army with an all-volunteer Army.

The fact that volunteers now populated the Army led to several significant changes in the nature of the fighting force. Overall, the Army was able to attract more qualified recruits, with more formal education, higher skill levels, less drug and alcohol abuse, and less involvement in crime. Women joined the service in larger numbers than ever before. This new, more qualified workforce markedly changed the level of technological sophistication, improvements in quality, and efficiency of performance.

The family responsibilities of military personnel and the relationships between the genders became critical issues for the Army, and ways of operating as well as some deeply embedded core values e. Technical training became both a key motivator and a key incentive for Army service, and access to educational benefits became the single greatest motivator for Army enlistment. The formation of a joint chiefs structure led to more coordination. The challenge faced by many managers of organizations is to actually lead a culture change effort themselves.

The question is, how can culture change be purposively stimulated and managed in an organization? How can a profound and fundamental shift in the way the organization thinks of itself be induced? Of the many approaches to systematically managing a culture change effort, one procedure, based on what is called the competing values framework, rests on the assumption that key dimensions of organizational culture can be assessed by way of a survey instrument a controversial assumption, as pointed out earlier in the chapter.

Highlighting the contradictory values and orientations that exist in all organizations, this framework identifies four types of organizational cultures also see Yeung et al.

Table identifies the two dimensions that separate these different value orientations. As illustrated in the table, these dimensions produce quadrants that have been found to represent much more than value orientations. They identify congruent leadership styles, bonding mechanisms, and dominant theories of effectiveness Cameron and Quinn, The two dimensions shown in the table, as well as the resulting quadrants and their attributes, have been empirically tested in multiple studies and have been found to have strong associations with organizational effectiveness e.

One dimension in the table differentiates values emphasizing flexibility, discretion, and dynamism from values emphasizing stability, order and control. This continuum ranges, in other words, from versatility and pliability on one end to steadiness and durability on the other end.

The second dimension differentiates values emphasizing an internal orientation, integration, and unity from values that emphasize an external orientation, differentiation, and competition.

This continuum ranges, in other words, from cohesion and consonance on one end to separation and independence on the other. Each of these culture types is based on different theories of organizational performance, values of goodness, leadership approaches, reward systems, core competencies, styles of management, and definitions of success. The Dutch-based Philips Electronics used this framework to manage an intended culture change in a five-step process see Cameron and Quinn, In the first step, the top management team reached consensus on the current organizational culture.

This was done by constructing a culture profile based on responses to a survey instrument that assessed dimensions. The consensus-producing discussion was an important clarification exercise in this step. In the second step, the top management team reached consensus on a "preferred" or future culture that they believed the organization had to achieve in order to become more successful. These two profiles, the current and the preferred cultures, were compared to identify discrepancies and to highlight needed changes.

The third step consisted of answering two questions regarding the observed discrepancies: 1 What does it mean to change? For example, a change toward a more team-oriented, participative culture and away from a controlling, directive culture meant that more value was placed on team performance, more decision authority was passed down to lower levels, and more sharing of leadership roles occurred.

It did not mean that measurements were abandoned, that individual accountability was shelved, or that policies and procedures were ignored. The fourth step involved identifying specifically what was to be done, operationalizing the change agenda developed in the previous three. The fifth step involved implementing the newly developed culture change agenda by executing a model for managing change e. Of course, culture change did not occur quickly. Time frames for successful change are usually measured in years even decades rather than in months.

The intent of any such model of culture change is simply to make the change management process systematic and rational rather than merely a product of historical or environmental inertia. Despite the current emphasis on change, innovation, and transformation of cultures, it is equally important for managers to understand how to maintain and reinforce cultures.

Some well-known organizations have found that they unwisely abandoned a culture that had proven successful in the past. Such abandonment may be gradual and unintended and occur more through neglect than conscious intent. It has been referred to as losing the organization's roots, abandoning core competency, and dishonoring the past Wilkins, For example, in the face of large market share losses to Japanese competitors, Harley-Davidson discovered the costs of abandoning the culture that had made it the premier motorcycle producer in the United States in the s.

The erosion of a sense of family and teamwork, the loss of feelings of employee involvement and empowerment, and the explosion of hierarchy and staff led to dismal quality, low morale, and poor management-worker relations.

The former Harley family culture had gradually eroded, and it was exposed only by the threat of company extinction in the late s. In addition to a number of major changes in manufacturing processes, supplier relations, and quality tools, a return to the core Harley-Davidson family culture was a significant reason why the firm recaptured market share and returned to profitability. A contrasting example to this unwitting change in organizational culture is Hewlett-Packard H-P.

Despite severe profit erosion and an environment that trumpeted the value of downsizing and head count reductions, H-P maintained the culture during the s and s that had been created by its founders, Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard.

H-P's keeping its full complement of staff, while other companies were taking lay-offs, conveyed the message that everyone on the team was valued and mattered to the company" Wilkins, An important question, of course, is how an organization can avoid culture drift in the face of pressures to change.

One powerful device under. These organizational practices and ceremonies exemplify and thus reinforce the core values of the organization and create resistance to drift. Some rites and rituals are focused on individuals, whereas others are focused on the organization or group. In addition to rites and ceremonies, selection and socialization are powerful levers to reinforce the culture.

Aronson and Mills long ago illustrated that when people go through a great deal of trouble or pain to obtain something, they value it more highly and protect it more vehemently. Pascale pointed out that the process of entry into an organization can powerfully reinforce its culture. Providing barriers to entry into the organization, having people earn their place in the system, and extracting a price for membership help reinforce and maintain the existing culture by creating more attraction to it and protection of it.

A host of additional mechanisms exist, of course, to reinforce desired cultures. Cultural leaders can, for example, specify how the central vision of the organization is relevant to current goals Cartright, and thus keep it relevant and vital. They can model the desired behaviors and preach desired values and beliefs. They can search out incongruent values and behaviors and work to eliminate them or bring them into alignment Nadler and Tushman, They can identify subcultures whose values and behaviors exemplify the desired culture and broadcast their accomplishments.

Finally, they can find and emphasize commonalties that override divisive conflicts. Imaginative managers can find almost unlimited opportunities to reinforce culture once they are sensitive to what culture is about. The discussion of organizational culture in this chapter suggests the following observations:. Total quality management TQM , reengineering, the workplace of the twenty-first century—the s have brought a sense of urgency to organizations to change or face stagnation and decline, according to Enhancing Organizational Performance.

Organizations are adopting popular management techniques, some scientific, some faddish, often without introducing them properly or adequately measuring the outcome. Enhancing Organizational Performance reviews the most popular current approaches to organizational change—total quality management, reengineering, and downsizing—in terms of how they affect organizations and people, how performance improvements can be measured, and what questions remain to be answered by researchers.

The committee explores how theory, doctrine, accepted wisdom, and personal experience have all served as sources for organization design. Alternative organization structures such as teams, specialist networks, associations, and virtual organizations are examined. Enhancing Organizational Performance looks at the influence of the organization's norms, values, and beliefs—its culture—on people and their performance, identifying cultural "levers" available to organization leaders. And what is leadership?

The committee sorts through a wealth of research to identify behaviors and skills related to leadership effectiveness. The volume examines techniques for developing these skills and suggests new competencies that will become required with globalization and other trends.

Mergers, networks, alliances, coalitions—organizations are increasingly turning to new intra- and inter-organizational structures. Enhancing Organizational Performance discusses how organizations cooperate to maximize outcomes. The committee explores the changing missions of the U.

Army as a case study that has relevance to any organization. Noting that a musical greeting card contains more computing power than existed in the entire world before , the committee addresses the impact of new technologies on performance. With examples, insights, and practical criteria, Enhancing Organizational Performance clarifies the nature of organizations and the prospects for performance improvement. This book will be important to corporate leaders, executives, and managers; faculty and students in organizational performance and the social sciences; business journalists; researchers; and interested individuals.

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