I overheard a conversation while I was at a gym. There were two friends who haven’t seen each other for a long time. One of them quipped: “Pare, parang nagdagdag ka ng timbang…” The other, to his defense, quickly said: “Galing kase ako ng out of town, tapos pyesta pa. Sarap kumain eh!”
I began to ponder, why is it so fast for us to always “defend” the outcomes of our action, when we have the choice before embarking into that feast set before us to begin with?
In my past 20 years of working, every time employees, be it my colleagues or subordinates, fell short of their performance”•broke a company policy or simply producing lackluster work”•their auto-pilot response was to blame the computer, blame the previous department, blame the system, or worse, blame the company culture.
Defining corporate culture
According to Haworth Research (2015), if you google the word “company culture”, it will show 290 million hits in just a fraction of a second, coming from articles such as Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, and other business publications. They argued that company culture is very important, however often misunderstood.
Organizational culture or company culture, which is a recent addition to our vocabulary in the 1980s, is defined as having three components: (1) values – the mission, how it represents itself and what it does; (2) assumptions are the attitudes formed through the various processes and actions that includes the mindset of the employees; and (3) artifacts where the company represents itself through its products, technologies, processes, dress code, location and even publication and architecture.
Understanding the Competing Values Framework
Robert Quinn and John Rohrbaugh (1983) showcased two major dimensions in the Competing Values Framework. They noted that there is a link between cultural types and organizational effectiveness which are anchored on flexibility versus stability and that of internal or external. The former speaks of the organization’s dynamism and its adaptation to change versus it’s conservativeness and consistency. The latter speaks of the movement of employees within thorough integration, teamwork and oneness against the outside forces of competition, differentiation and rivalry.
From this X and Y axis, they were able to produce a quadrant called Collaborate, Create, Control and Compete – each having a distinct characteristic where flexibility meets internal or external and focused the other end of flexibility meeting the inside dynamics of the firm or that of the outside.
It is imperative to know the differences of each, since there will always be a dominant culture underneath are subcultures that interplay. How leaders and its members harness such interactions will be their key in achieving corporate success.
Leveraging on competitiveness
It is inevitable that different departments will have different subcultures, but is it important for the organization to identify where they are in the quadrant. By doing so, rather than having the pinpointing to other departments of the blame, if such culture exists, why not leverage on the “competitiveness” of each department and give them an incentive on coming up with a seamless process of accountability and sense of ownership?
If the blaming is mostly inside out, why not equip the team members of understanding external competition and let them learn from the best practices others are doing and improve on it. Ultimately, understanding the collective mentalities and behaviors of individuals and transforming these idiosyncrasies to the advantage of the organization will then create improved processes, have a greater sense of accountability and benchmark on other companies customized to that of the firm’s culture.
Playing the blame game
Todd McKinnon, CEO of Okta, highlighted the importance of the role of the leader and communication to make sure that every single employee is aware of the company culture. They must let the members and stakeholders to know the brutal fact that there’s a “blaming culture” within and understand where the blame is mostly pointed out.
If it’s an inside blame game, what should the people do about it? If the blaming is always pointed at the external, how can they make these external forces be to their advantage?
A bad organization with various subcultures that clash with each other is not a hopeless organization. Leaders and open communication play a key role to ensure goals are met, relationships are improved and roles are portrayed to the best of their capabilities.
Otherwise, if the blaming is just a recurring thing that happens year-in-year-out, then people, from top all the way to the bottom, should just blame themselves. Why? Because they had all the time and effort to improve it but never acted on it.
Alvin Neil Gutierrez is a DBA student from the Ramon V. Del Rosario College of Business of De La Salle University. He took up his Masters in Human Resource Management as an AUSAID scholar from The University of Sydney Business School. He is also an Assistant Professor in the Marketing Department teaching Personal Selling and Sales Force Management, Marketing Management and Strategic Human Resource for Masters and Undergrads. He can be reached at alvin.gutierrez@dlsu.edu.ph.
The views expressed here are the author’s and do not necessarily reflect the official position of DLSU, its faculty and its administrators.