Organizational Behavior (Stephen Robbins)

Dingwall recognized the importance of acknowledging good performance from employees.

He wanted employees to meet customer demands quickly and efficiently. He suggested that the

old culture at the Mint was partially responsible for not encouraging new ideas and initiatives

by employees. “One of the big things I found at the Mint was a real reluctance to celebrate,”

he said.

Dingwall gave each of his vice-presidents a budget for celebrating achievements. “I am

sure there was some celebration in the past, but now if you don’t have celebrations in your oper-

ations I want to know why. That is the difference.” In what other ways might Dingwall have cre-

ated a high-performance culture at the Mint?

An organization’s culture does not pop out of thin air. Once established, it rarely fades away.
Exhibit 10-3 summarizes how an organization’s culture is established and sustained. The
original culture derives from the founder’s philosophy. This in turn strongly influences the
criteria used in hiring. The actions of the current top management set the general climate
of what is acceptable behaviour and what is not. How employees are to be socialized will
depend both on the degree of success an organization achieves in matching new employ-
ees’ values to its own in the selection process and on top management’s preference for
socialization methods. We describe each part of this process below.

How a Culture Begins

An organization’s current customs, traditions, and gen-
eral way of doing things largely owe to what it has done
before and how successful those previous endeavours
have been. This leads us to the ultimate source of an orga-
nization’s culture: its founders.^21
The founders traditionally have a major impact on that
organization’s early culture. They have a vision of what
the organization should be. They are not constrained by previous customs or ideologies.
Because new organizations are typically small, it is possible for the founders to impose
their vision on all organizational members.
A culture can be created in three ways.^22 First, founders hire and keep only employees
who think and feel the way they do. Second, they indoctrinate and socialize these employ-
ees to their way of thinking and feeling. Finally, the founders’ behaviour acts as a role
model, encouraging employees to identify with the founders and internalize those beliefs,
values, and assumptions. When the organization succeeds, the founders’ vision is seen as
a primary determinant of that success. At that point, the founders’ entire personality
becomes embedded in the culture of the organization.
For example, Microsoft’s culture is largely a reflection of its co-founder, chair, and
chief software architect (and former CEO), Bill Gates. Gates is personally aggressive,
competitive, and highly disciplined. Those are the same characteristics often used to
describe the software giant he founded. Other contemporary examples of founders who

Chapter 10 Organizational Culture and Change 337

2 How do you create and

maintain organizational

culture?

Selection

criteria

Socialization

Organization's

culture

Philosophy

of

organization's

founders

To p

management

EXHIBIT 10-3 How Organizational Cultures Form

Is culture the same

*as rules?

Bill Gates, Microsoft

http://www.microsoft.com/billgates/

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