Three Cultures of Management: The Key to Organizational Learning

Reading Time: 35 min 

Topics

Permissions and PDF

Why do organizations fail to learn how to learn and therefore remain competitively marginal? In this article, I try to explain why organizational innovations either don’t occur or fail to survive and proliferate. Some typical explanations revolve around vague concepts of “resistance to change,” or “human nature,” or failures of “leadership.” I propose a more fundamental reason for such learning failures, derived from the fact that, in every organization, there are three particular cultures among its subcultures, two of which have their roots outside the organization and are therefore more fundamentally entrenched in their particular assumptions. Every organization develops an internal culture based on its operational success, what I call the “operator culture.” But every organization also has, in its various functions, the designers and technocrats who drive the core technologies. I call this the “engineering culture”; their fundamental reference group is their worldwide occupational community. Every organization also has its executive management, the CEO and his or her immediate subordinates — what I call the “executive culture.” CEOs, because of the nature of their jobs and the structure of the capital markets, also constitute a worldwide occupational community in the sense that they have common problems that are unique to their roles.

These three cultures are often not aligned with each other, and it is this lack of alignment that causes the failures of organizational learning that I will discuss. The question is whether we have misconceived the initial problem by focusing on organizational learning, when, in fact, it is the executive and engineering communities that must begin their own learning process if we are to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

Organizations Don’t Learn; Innovations Don’t Last or Diffuse

The ability to create new organizational forms and processes, to innovate in both the technical and organizational arenas, is crucial to remaining competitive in an increasingly turbulent world. But this kind of organizational learning requires not only the invention of new forms but also their adoption and diffusion to the other relevant parts of the organization and to other organizations in a given industry. Organizations still have not learned how to manage that process. The examples of successful organizational learning we have seen either tend to be short-run adaptive learning — doing better at what we are already doing — or, if they are genuine innovations, tend to be isolated and eventually subverted and abandoned.

Topics

References

1. C. Argyris, R. Putnam, and D. Smith, Action Science (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1985);

P. Senge, The Fifth Discipline (New York: Doubleday, 1990); and

R. Beckhard and R.T. Harris, Organizational Transitions: Managing Complex Change, 2nd ed. (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1987).

2. G.L. Roth and A. Kleiner, “The Learning Initiative at the Auto Company Epsilon Program” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Organizational Learning Center, working paper 18.005, 1996).

3. G.L. Roth, “In Search of the Paperless Office” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT, Ph.D. dissertation, 1993).

4. R.J. Thomas, What Machines Can’t Do (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1994).

5. D.M. McGregor, The Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1960).

6. E.H. Schein and W.G. Bennis, Personal and Organizational Change through Group Methods: The Laboratory Approach (New York: John Wiley, 1965); and

R.R. Blake, J.S. Mouton, and A.A. McCanse, Change by Design (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley, 1989).

7. J. Van Maanen and S.R. Barley, “Occupational Communities: Culture and Control in Organizations,” in B.M. Staw and L.L. Cummings, eds., Research in Organizational Behavior, vol. 6 (Greenwich, Connecticut: JAI Press, 1984).

8. E.H. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, second edition (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1992a).

9. E.H. Schein, “The Role of the Founder in the Creation of Organizational Culture” Organizational Dynamics, Summer 1983, pp. 13–28.

10. Van Maanen and Barley (1984).

11. S. Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine: The Future of Work (New York: Basic Books, 1988).

12. G. Kunda, Engineering Culture: Control and Commitment in a High-Tech Corporation (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992).

13. E.H. Schein, “The Role of the CEO in the Management of Change: The Case of Information Technology,” in T.A. Kochan and M. Useem, eds., Transforming Organizations (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992b).

14. G. Donaldson and J.W. Lorsch, Decision Making at the Top (New York: Basic Books, 1983).

15. Schein (1983).

16. J. Carroll and C. Perin, “Organizing and Managing for Safe Production: New Frameworks, New Questions, New Actions” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Center for Energy and Environmental Policy Research, Report NSP 95-005, 1995).

17. Blake et al. (1989).

18. Schein (1992a, 1992b).

19. L. Thurow, The Future of Capitalism (New York: William Morrow, 1996).

20. W.N. Isaacs, “Taking Flight: Dialogue, Collective Thinking, and Organizational Learning,” Organizational Dynamics, Winter 1993, pp. 24–39; and

E.H. Schein, “On Dialogue, Culture, and Organizational Learning,” Organizational Dynamics, Winter 1993, pp. 40–51.

21. E.H. Schein, “Building the Learning Consortium” (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Organizational Learning Center, working paper 10.005, 1995).

Reprint #:

3811

More Like This

Add a comment

You must to post a comment.

First time here? Sign up for a free account: Comment on articles and get access to many more articles.

Comment (1)
Michael weir
I think that one of the reasons that these three groups do not "align" very well is a fundamental difference in perspective.  In my experience (25 years in the corporate culture), prejudices between the groups grow over time as each group views their own worth to the overall organization.  The sales team thinks it is brining in all the money.  Engineering believes that without their brain trust, there would be no product.  Executives think that their management savvy is responsible for the company's growth.  These built in prejudices only grow in strength over time, and it requires a very strong management team (in each group) to direct all groups toward a focused  and strategic "learning program" that benefits the entire organization (in line with the direction that the senior executive team (and board) want the organization pointed towards.