Joanne Martin Organizational Culture | Organizational Culture Perspectives

What is Organizational Culture?

Organizational culture is defined as the behavior of humans within. They share values beliefs and norms that influence how employees feel and act towards others in the organization; In essence, it is the organization’s personality, and the idea is that every organization has its own culture as a unique identity.

While the existence of this concept of organizational culture is accepted, there do exist different viewpoints on what this culture is like.

Managerial Perspective and Social Science Perspective to Organizational Culture

The main two views the managerial perspective and the social science perspective.

Managerial Perspective on Organizational Behaviour

The managerial perspective believes there is a link between strong culture and organizational performance.

Social Science Perspective on Organizational Behaviour

While the social science perspective holds that organizational culture is an overused term and one that is not defined correctly.

The most effective way to summarize the differences between the two perspectives is to split them through their terminology.

The managerial perspective would say the culture has, whereas the social science perspective would say culture is. The managerial view holds that organizations possess a culture that can be controlled and managed.

The culture is acquired by its employees and handed over to the newcomers who have not taken part in creating it.

Culture is capable of intervention and control, and so managers can use it as a tool for change.

The social science view holds that organizational culture is something that the organization is, individuals, do things and work together in certain ways, which creates a culture that evolves spontaneously. For this reason, it cannot be managed or quantified.

The culture exists only through social interactions throughout the organization between its members, and such might even be different from what management wants.

The social science view criticizes the managerial view for having ambitions to shape others’ beliefs because the managerial view studies the methods to change an organization’s culture. An example is studying how a leader’s behaviour shapes the organization’s culture.

Joanne Martin Organizational Culture/ Cultures in Organizations Three Perspectives

Joanne Martin, a Stanford professor, presents three perspectives on organizational culture, which are seen as important by academics because they branch out the managerial versus the social science view.

The three organizational perspective frameworks developed by Joanne Martin in 1992 includes; integration perspective, differentiation perspective and fragmentation perspectives . They provide an understanding of organizational culture.

Integration Perspective Organizational Culture

This is the managerial view. An organization possesses a unified culture, and its employees subscribe to this.

With a clear set of values comes employee behaviour guided by these beliefs, values, and norms.

The integration or managerial perspective appears to suggest that there is a relationship between strong culture and improved performance

The idea is that the common features in an organization will improve the organizational effectiveness because employees will be more committed and easier to control if the pool of employees is not diverse.

Differentiation Perspective Organizational Culture

This is the social science perspective. The idea here is that every organization consists of multiple groups, namely subcultures, each of which has its own characteristics.

This is naturally very true of large organizations, and the subcultures are reflective of the differentiation of occupations within organizations.

This is caused by the range of occupations as well as the geographical divisions and age. The reasoning is age differences. since there are multiple interest groups within organizations, they’re going to be multiple cultures in there as well.

Cultural pluralism is a fundamentalist aspect of all organizations according to this viewpoint, the subcultures are Frito overlap and contradict each other.

Fragmentation Perspective Organizational Culture

This is against social science. This perspective assumes the absence of consensus on innovation, the inevitability of conflict in a way building on the idea that they’re subdivisions cultures.

This perspective sees organizations as a set of groups that are in nature, supposed to be opposed to one another, but these are reconciled through managerial activity.

These groups, an interesting feature of this perspective is that it sees conflict not as a consensus but as the norm within organizations.

Just like the differentiation perspective, the fragmentation perspective dismisses the idea of there being a single culture.