I went on a little long in the last video, so I'm going to try to pack a few in this one as opposed to the prior. The fourth question that I'm going to address is, how can the culture of a large organization be changed? How do we being? Do strong cultures always result in organizational success? And this was Shirley's question. So, my sense is quite a few of you felt that management has to adopt a culture in order to kind of change it, right? And I think you're right. In many ways, the access to defining cultures within organizations, or any social group, is not equal. And certain individuals who are more visible, who have access to more choice arenas, and to points where they can define what the situations are, and express identities, and engage in interpersonal rituals. Those are people who are defining the culture of the firm. They're the one's that have greater access to how it's being represented and experienced by people. So I think this means that culture tends to be something driven primarily from the leadership on down. But it also means that it's also the fact that culture can be slow to change, because it's not that it always reaches everyone equally. So it's important that, if you really do want to change a culture, to realize that individuals, the participants of that organization, are actually carriers of that culture, and it's through a variety of tacit and implicit practices. So, being able to have turnover is a key feature to organizational change. Many of you say that top-down is more efficient, but it's kind of an imposition, though, and a way that you can force through. I mean, you can constrain access, and certain individuals in management are the only ones that do presentation rituals that are visible and valued or awarded. That could lead to a sense of imposition, as well as kind of resistance to the culture. So you also do want kind of bottom-up processes. Albeit the individuals doing bottom-up processes of culture creation have less leverage and visibility. So my sense is you probably want kind of a combination of the two. I think Karen gives us a great idea of how to implement the bottom-up processes of culture creation, that's through teams and conversations. That successful teams and conversations that they get recognized that that's a way of kind of revealing where bottom-up kinds of feedback in the culture are useful and can be integrated. Having managers that value that also creates buy-in and a sense of investment that's not just top-down but bottom-up as well. Chan Chuan Nguyen had a very nice observation that the company culture can also change from pressures in the environment. It's not just all within the firm, due to managers and employees. That outside the company, there are pressures. And this is actually something that we're going to spend an awful lot of time on in week nine, using institutional theory, where we look at culture and the environment as affecting the firm. If it doesn't adopt that those kinds of values, practices and classifications that it won't survive. It won't be considered a real and appropriate kind of organization. So, I think those are kind of answers to the question about can it be changed in a large one in particular. The fifth question was by Tammy, and she asks, how can you determine an organization's culture from a job interview. I love this question because it's often the only way we learn about a firm before we join it and it's a great way to understand what you're getting into. So a lot of the readings and the lecture as well as kind of your comments recall a bunch of facts that you can use in preparation for the interview and in the interview. So the first thing is do your homework, read the mission statements, look at the URLs, any videos online, talks, the front, the kind of written materials, whatever the front of the organization is, you can find. That's kind of a background. It's clearly kind of doctored and presented in the most positive light. When you're there, in the interview, you can look at all the features we talked about this week, from dress, use of space, symbols, language, style, how people relate to each other and to you, what procedures they use and how they do their work. Notice in particular disagreements and how they manage social dramas. How are those handled? That kind of reveals what's valued and thought of as undesirable. Consider your own values and priorities, too, in relation to those of the firm. As well as kind of whether it's something that you feel fits your personal beliefs. I mean, you obviously don't want to take on a job that puts you in an unethical or a problematic position in terms of your mores. So there was actually a great post by someone anonymous, who references a neat blog that advises you how to ask about a company's culture. I mean, I think the challenge there is you don't want to ask it directly because it can be kind of threatening to some extent to say what are your values, not what are your values, but what's your culture? It's kind of awkward. But you can ask in positive ways these things, and the three that I saw in that blog were really great. It fits this idea of ritual, culture, how we create sacred objects that we value that are charged with meaning, that then become powerful influences on us and shape our identities. The questions were, what are you excited about? Right? That was the question to ask. What are you proud of? This kind of reveals what they focus on as sacred, as something important, that's not just the everyday and the profane. It's something central to this company. Asking them, who are you close friends or who do you work with closely in this company might even be more appropriate. How does the team work together? Those kind of questions are all kind of inquiries about practices and processes as well as kind of excitement, positive energy that they place on things. I think through that you get a good sense of what the company culture is about. Perhaps a better interviewing experience might be, like the one that Laurie Lager related about her father where he went in for an eight hour interview with HP. And it was more of a, here is our company, here's your department, here would be your employees, here's a sample project. You guys work on it. She says that her father loved this kind of interview because he got to know the other workers who he would be managing. And he got to know how the uppers handled projects and how his team would kind of operate. So he kind of saw how they might fit together in a more kind of micro processual form of these interpersonal rituals, which many interviews don't really reveal much about. They see them as stylistic or kind of types. So that kind of interviewing experience probably would be ideal, especially if you're worried about the kind of culture you're entering and whether it would be a place for you that would make you happy. Most of us really do care about our organizational culture, that is not just about the money, that we'd like to have this kind of positive experience where we find our identities developed and aligned with the kind of conceptions of self that we hold dear. This actually leads me to the last question I'm going to talk about this week because I don't want to have screen side chats going on forever, you see plenty of lectures. The sixth question is, have you worked extra hours or done extra jobs for free for your organization, what made you do so, what role did the organization culture play in this? And this is by Eugenia. Many of you have responded that you did a lot of these kind of these free efforts and worked long hours because you believe in the purpose of the job. That you valued the work from a personal basis. That you thought it was interesting. So these are intrinsic motives. Or that you felt like it did a service, a social good that all of these are kind of logics of appropriateness. They're intrinsic motives done out of duty or a sense of identity fulfillment. And so, others of you that mentioned not just this intrinsic logic of appropriateness kind of motive, but also kind of personal relationships of trust and a positive and a personal climate. That once you're in that kind of situation, this is Robert, who I'm kind of drawing on a little bit here. Once you're in those kind of relationship, you feel obliged or you enjoy working and interacting with one another. And this leads you to kind of want to help one another, because you have these personal bonds. It's not just that you're doing something for the sake of some outcome, but that you're doing it out of the sake of your relationships in your role. So, another thing that people talked about was, Melissa, for example, said that you were doing something important and meaningful work you believe in. That you have positive relationships in doing the work, that was the second point. And that the work is recognized and valued by others. So that's the third. It's not just that you have these positive relations or that you're doing meaningful work you believe in and identify with, but that it's externally recognized, it's visible, it's a value and sacredness beyond just your own self and sense of what you believe in. That it has some external reinforcement. Others of you did mention fun, and I thought that's actually a great one to think about a little bit. Which is that certain activities, like the process of work, we might find enjoyable on its own. That we enjoy the game of accomplishing a task. That's also a kind of an intrinsic motive but it's not necessarily about the duty of it, but that we enjoyed the process. So, it's slightly different. And then, quite a few of you mentioned that you put in extra hours because of self-improvement, that this is something that you think is a long-term investment. That it's going to help you in some way and that you enjoy this kind of growth experience. So, I think there's quite a bit here and that, there's quite a bit we can draw on in terms of thinking about why we end up working far more. And I think last week about organizational learning, we all realized, boy this kind of assumes we are going to put in many, many more hours than what we're paid for, and the question is why. And I think the organizational cultures that we create give us reasons for why, or at least that we see ourselves in them, and through that, or interpersonal relations or some kind of enjoyment and energy that we get from work. In fact, some firms have been so good at generating an organizational culture that people would rather be at work than at home in their families. And this is something to think about because particularly firms like Google that put everything in the workplace, from all your chores to everything else, it's increasing the time of you're at work. And providing you with this positive experiences. In some way, you could view it as a problem that might interfere with others spheres of your life. And the other argument might be your other spheres of life may also need a redesign or re-engineering of the organizational culture they have, so that they aren't eclipsed by it. So I think there's many ways we can view this, but I do think that it's clear in organizational culture that plays to our intrinsic motives, that plays to our relationships and our sense of support from others. Our recognition we get, and the fun we get, and the self improvement we get really do heighten the kind of commitments and participation we afford the firms we're a part of. So great questions this week. I look forward to seeing you again this week with resource dependence theory and we talk more about mergers. And finally, about money and dependencies that all of these things we've talked about so far don't necessarily get into the realities of real politics of survival due to kind of being controlled or not having autonomy from resources with other firms in the environment. So hopefully you find this next week's set of lectures just as enlightening as the prior ones and I look forward to seeing you on the forum.
