Influencing Organizational Culture

In the management discourse few words are thrown about more carelessly than organizational culture . While the term is usually defined too broadly including such phenomena as assumptions, values, traditions, articles of faith, myths and artifacts this book applies a far more narrow concept. Organizational culture, or the informal structure of an organization, is a term used to describe the behavioral expectations in an organization that have not been decided on in a formal way but that evolved by means of repetition and imitation. This book shows how this narrow definition makes it possible to more precisely observe and understand an organization s culture and its changes. Management s only way for influencing organizational culture and this may sound paradoxical at first is to change the organization s formal structure as for example its incentive schemes, goal-setting processes, strategic directions or hierarchy.    

Stefan Kühl is professor of sociology at the University of Bielefeld in Germany and works as a consultant for Metaplan, a consulting firm based in Princeton, Hamburg, Shanghai, Singapore, Versailles and Zurich.