Untangling the effects of cultural content, strength and hierarchical subcultures on change implementation |
| Presenter: |
Ray Zammuto, Professor, UQ Business School |
| When: |
Friday, 29 May 2009 |
| Where: |
Room 211, Chamberlain Building, UQ St Lucia Campus |
| Time: |
10.30am - 12.00pm |
| Cluster: |
Strategy Cluster |
| Biography: |
Raymond F. Zammuto (PhD, University of Illinois) is Professor in Strategy and Sustainability at the University of Queensland Business School. He teaches in the areas of strategic management, organization design and technology management. He has consulted on and conducted workshops about organization culture, organization redesign and strategic management for a variety of service and manufacturing organizations, ranging from hospitals and universities to insurance companies and computer firms.
His research focuses on various aspects of how organizations adapt to changing industry conditions, including studies of how organizations' cultures can impede or enhance their ability to innovate and to implement new technologies. He has published three books, Business Driven Information Technology, Assessing Organizational Effectiveness: Systems Change, Adaptation, and Strategy and Organizations: Theory and Design, as well as numerous journal articles and book chapters.
Professor Zammuto has served as Division Chair of the Organization and Management Theory Division of the Academy of Management. He has been a member of several editorial boards including the Academy of Management Journal, Administrative Science Quarterly, Organization Science and the Journal of International Business Studies. He was the lead guest editor for a special issue of Organization Science on "Information Technology and Organizational Form and Function" in 2007, and is a past Associate Editor of the Academy of Management Executive, a journal dedicated to translating academic theory and research into practical information for managers. |
| Workshop Paper: |
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| Abstract: |
Many studies that cite organizational culture as a barrier to change focus on cultural content—a culture's shared values, beliefs and assumptions. This paper argues that two other aspects of culture that focus on the consistency of a culture's content—cultural strength (the extent to which cultural values are widely shared) and the presence of hierarchical subcultures (significant differences in managers' and non-managers' cultural beliefs)—also can affect implementation outcomes. Within the context of the competing values framework (CVF), I hypothesize that cultural content supporting a change initiative will be positively related to implementation, that strong cultures will positively or negatively affect implementation depending on whether cultural content supports the change initiative, and that the presence of hierarchical subcultures will negatively affect implementation. A reanalysis of Shortell et al.'s (1995) large-scale study of quality implementation in 67 hospitals shows that cultural content emphasizing the CVF's human relations and open systems quadrants is positively related to implementation, and that strong control-oriented cultures (e.g., emphasizing the internal process and rational goal quadrants) are negatively related to implementation. Most striking, however, is the finding that the presence of hierarchical subcultures is negatively related to implementation regardless of cultural content. Moreover, the presence of hierarchical subcultures explains as much variance in implementation as cultural content does. These results suggest that a more nuanced view of the role of organizational culture in facilitating or hindering change initiatives is warranted. |
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