Presentation on designing strategy for cultural change

Presented by BABASAB PATIL

Strategies for cultural change

There are two alternative approaches to culture change: Top down Bottoms up

Top down
The top down approach is referred to as programmatic Change and is introduced and steered by the top or senior managers. These generally focus on artefacts and employee behavior and tend to extend to the entire organization. The typical changes involved in this approach are structural change, relocation of spaces, training and development, empowerment, quality initiatives and so on.

 These on Paradoxes in this approaches as on the one hand it talks of autonomy and empowerment, on the other it follows directive approach like team briefing. Similarly, culture transformation is perceived as the task of a leader.

Bottoms up
The bottoms up changes involve incremental changes and are linked with an organizations critical path Here the change is initiated by a manager in one part of the organization. There is no formal structure or system, the focus is on solving a concrete business problem. The bottoms up task alignment is an approach that may involve a series of over lapping steps at a site or a business unit emphasizing developing peoples capabilities, enhancing mobilizing commitment and shared vision.

Organization culture and national culture

Organization culture is receiving considerable attention from researchers and managers alike who consider it to be a socializing influence and creator of organizational climate. They assume that organizational culture can override national culture and multinational organization, people belonging to different countries will be more similar. The finding of Hofsted (1980) in a single multinational organization operating in 40 countries proves that only 50% of the different in employees attitudes and behavior can be explained by national culture of the employees but its contribution in explaining their behavior much more than their organizational role, race, gender or age.

Cross cultural content

With the advent of technology and global village making its mark, the number of business travelers from and to different countries has increased multifold in the past last 15 years. The world has literally become very small. This has brought in the need of knowing and understanding the various cultures of the countries that we travel to in order to clearly understand the needs and deal with them appropriately,

 Too often business relationship suffer because we fail to understand the psychology and behavior of that nation compounded by the blurred pictures we carry about them that the movies and novels have given us. Each culture world operates according to its own internal dynamic, its own principles and its own laws written and unwritten.

Managing cross cultural diversity

Cultural diversity is a part of organizational life in the present business environment and can not be ignored. The question How to manage it? When a manager focuses attention on cultural differences, it causes problems as it is often confused with evaluation of a culture. Judging organizational members, inappropriate, ethnocentric, sexist or racist attitude and behavior. But if the culture differences are recognized with a view to managing them, it would minimize the problems and maximize the advantages of cultural diversity.

 Culture diversity can be managed effectively by developing synergy among members to function as a teams. This can be done by forming groups with members of divers cultures and providing them structured learning experience and adequate training

Thank you