Scholars attempting to study an organization’s culture normally begin with a detailed analysis of the cultural elements within the office. According to the author’s cultural elements include metaphors, rituals, stories, artifacts, heroes and heroines, performances, and values. Defining these cultural elements within the organization and analyzing them will give the researcher a great place to start when they attempt to transform the culture of the institution.
Reading over the various cultural elements I thought about my first fulltime job at a hotel in which I had some organizational influence in directing a small team of front desk employees. I was struck by how these elements particularly the metaphors, heroes and heroines, and values are unique to each organization yet can be disastrous if they hold negative connotations. At this hotel we used complicated software that was unintuitive and took new employees nearly a month to learn. It seemed to me to be holding new employees back and as an organization with such high turnover (yearly at about 80%) I felt that it would be more cost effective and in the best interests of the company to upgrade to a newer more intuitive model. This hotel had been run nearly the same for the past 25 years and I quickly realized that any suggestion at improving technology or shifting resources was considered anathema to the organization’s cultural values. Consistency and self reliance were valued above all other values and as such a leap forward in technology especially to ease the transition for new employees was consistently shot down.
1 comment:
You did a good job of tying all the information in chapter 5 together in a concise paragraph.
I was thinking about the organization I work for and the culture that exists in a law enforcement department. I can think of examples from my own personal experience of metaphors, rituals, stories, artifacts, heros, performance, and values that exist. For example, when someone at works speaks about the events of their career it is a “war story.” Transitioning from a culture of a male dominated profession to one where men and women are working side by side has created a whole new set of dynamics, such as; women have never been part of the SWAT Team. The SWAT Team has always been considered the elitist of men, well trained, frat organization, where women have never tread before. The culture of this “hero” group is a culture within a culture within our organization. They have special pins, uniforms, language (verbal and nonverbal), jokes, bantering, etc.that no one else is privy to. If someone from the outside of this group decides to be a part of this culture, then there are several ritualistic steps one must go through to be accepted. The rituals include a physical agility test, weapons skills test, team interview, and group selection. Additionally, your personnel records are reviewed to determine if you would be a candidate for the team. So far, there are no women on the tactical portion of the team, but there are some women who are Crisis Negotiators. This position is an accepted norm for women to have because it is considered a sensitive and less dangerous environment to work in, thus acceptable to a partial membership into SWAT.
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