Perspectives: modern business stereotypes to avoid

The organizational world is awash with talk of corporate culture—and for good reason. Culture has become a powerful way to hold a company together against a tidal wave of pressures for disintegration, such as decentralization, de-layering, and downsizing. At the same time, traditional mechanisms for integration—hierarchies and control systems, among other devices—are proving costly and ineffective.

Culture, then, is what remains to bolster a company’s identity as one organization. Without culture, a company lacks values, direction, and purpose. Does that matter? For the answer, just observe any company with a strong culture—and then compare it to one without.

But what is corporate culture? Perhaps more important, is there one right culture for every organization? And if the answer is no—which we firmly believe—how can a manager change an organization’s culture? Those three questions are the subject of this article.

Culture, in a word, is community. It is an outcome of how people relate to one another. Communities exist at work just as they do outside the commercial arena. Like families, villages, schools, and clubs, businesses rest on patterns of social interaction that sustain them over time or are their undoing. They are built on shared interests and mutual obligations and thrive on cooperation and friendships. It is because of the commonality of all communities that we believe a business’s culture can be better understood when viewed through the same lens that has illuminated the study of human organizations for nearly 150 years.

That is the lens of sociology, which divides community into two types of distinct human relations: sociability and solidarity. Briefly, sociability is a measure of sincere friendliness among members of a community. Solidarity is a measure of a community’s ability to pursue shared objectives quickly and effectively, regardless of personal ties. These two categories may at first seem not to capture the whole range of human behaviors, but they have stood the test of close scrutiny, in both academia and the field.

Business intelligence is a must in modern growth strategy building. Stereotypes occurs in the absence of perspective

Paul Newman

What do sociability and solidarity have to do with culture? The answer comes when you plot the dimensions against each other. The result is four types of community: networked, mercenary, fragmented, and communal. (See the matrix “Two Dimensions, Four Cultures.”) None of these cultures is “the best.” In fact, each is appropriate for different business environments. In other words, managers need not begin the hue and cry for one cultural type over another. Instead, they must know how to assess their own culture and whether it fits the competitive situation. Only then can they consider the delicate techniques for transforming it.

Sociability and Solidarity in Close Focus

Sociability, like the laughter that is its hallmark, often comes naturally. It is the measure of emotional, noninstrumental relations (those in which people do not see others as a means of satisfying their own ends) among individuals who regard one another as friends. Friends tend to share certain ideas, attitudes, interests, and values and usually associate on equal terms. In its pure form, sociability represents a type of social interaction that is valued for its own sake. It is frequently sustained through continuing face-to-face relations characterized by high levels of unarticulated reciprocity. Under these circumstances, there are no prearranged “deals.” We help one another, we talk, we share, we laugh and cry together—with no strings attached.

In business communities, the benefits of high sociability are clear and numerous. First, most employees agree that working in such an environment is enjoyable, which helps morale and esprit de corps. Sociability also is often a boon to creativity because it fosters teamwork, sharing of information, and a spirit of openness to new ideas, and allows the freedom to express and accept out-of-the-box thinking. Sociability also creates an environment in which individuals are more likely to go beyond the formal requirements of their jobs. They work harder than is technically necessary to help their colleagues—that is, their community—look good and succeed.