Influencing Organizational Culture: A Very Brief Introduction

In the management discourse few words are thrown about more carelessly than ’organizational culture’. While the term is usually defined too broadly--including such phenomena as assumptions, values, traditions, articles of faith, myths and artifacts--this book applies a far more narrow concept. Organizational culture, or the informal structure of an organization, is a term used to describe the behavioral expectations in an organization that have not been decided on in a formal way but that evolved by means of repetition and imitation. This book shows how this narrow definition makes it possible to more precisely observe and understand an organization’s culture and its changes. Management’s only way for influencing organizational culture--and this may sound paradoxical at first--is to change the organization’s formal structure as for example its incentive schemes, goal-setting processes, strategic directions or hierarchy.

Stefan Kühl is professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld in Germany and works as a consultant for Metaplan, a consulting firm based in Princeton, Hamburg, Shanghai, Singapore, Versailles and Zurich.