Strategic Management - Strategy Implementation
Cultural Web and Cultural Audit - Organization Structure And Culture
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The cultural web is a useful way of considering forces for and against change.
Cultural Web
The cultural web is a useful way of considering forces for and against change. The cultural web provides an understanding on how an organization’s culture will affect its ability to change and adapt to new policies or environments. The organization’s cultural web is a set of assumptions about the organization that have been internalized. It represents the collective experience built up over years and all organizations develop a degree of coherence in their culture to be able to function effectively. Because organizational cultures are not easy to change, they have an important impact on strategy.
Figure 18.8 is a schematic representation of the cultural web. The different elements of the cultural web are described in greater detail below:
Stories:
Stories are told about the organization by its members to each other and to new recruits. They distil the organization’s past and legitimize behaviour, in the tradition of tribal love, complete with myths, legends, heroes and taboos.
Routines and rituals ‘Routine’:
Routines and rituals ‘Routine is the way members behave towards each other and towards those outside the organization. ‘Rituals’ are the special events through which the organization emphasizes what is important and how things are done in the organization.
Symbol:
These are the trappings of status and privilege in the organization. Symbols such as logos, offices, cars and titles become a representation of the nature of the organization.
Organizational structure:
This reflects the power structure and sets down important relationships within the organization.
Control Systems:
These are the measurement and reward systems that represent what are important areas of focus of the organization.
Power Structures:
The powerful managerial groupings are likely to be associated with the set of core assumptions and beliefs of the organization.
Cultural Audit
In order to understand how the culture contributes to the problem, and work out how it needs to change in order for the organization to deliver the strategy effectively, a cultural audit can be carried out. The cultural audit analyzes different aspects of the organization’s cultural web. A cultural audit is conducted through:
1. Listening to people talk about their organization
2. Observing the organization’s day to day operations
3. Asking mangers to audit themselves using a checklist.
An audit of the cultural web should bring up a number of questions that have been shown in Table. This is representative of the different influences that play on the organization.
Tags : Strategic Management - Strategy Implementation
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