Why are companies with strong cultures less effective than those with moderately strong cultures?

-One of these, shown Page 301in Exhibit 13.2, identifies seven corporate cultures.
-Another popular model identifies four organizational cultures organized in a two-by-two table representing internal versus external focus and flexibility versus control.
-Other models organize cultures around a circle with 8 or 12 categories.
-These circumplex models suggest that some cultures are opposite to others, such as an avoidance culture versus a self-actualization culture, or a power culture versus a collegial culture.11
-The diversity of corporate cultures is evident in a recent study of espoused values at the top 500 American companies.12 The study distilled these values down to nine categories. Integrity appeared most often, followed by teamwork, innovation, respect, quality, safety, community, communication, and hard work. But each of these categories includes a large number of specific values. The "respect" category, for instance, includes the specific values of diversity, inclusion, development, empowerment, and dignity. Because there are dozens of espoused values, there would be an equally long list of enacted values.
-concern is that organizational culture models and measures typically ignore the shared assumptions aspect of culture. This oversight likely occurs because measuring shared assumptions is even more difficult than measuring shared values. -A third concern is that many organizational culture models incorrectly assume that organizations have a fairly clear, unified culture that is easily decipherable.13 In reality, an organization's culture is typically blurry and fragmented.
-Furthermore, an organization's culture is founded on the values of its employees. Employees have diverse hierarchies of values, so an organization's culture necessarily has noticeable variability. Thus, many of the popular organizational culture models and measures oversimplify the variety of organizational cultures and falsely presume that organizations can easily be identified within these categories.

the observable symbols and signs of an organization's culture
-observable symbols and signs of an organization's culture, such as the way visitors are greeted, the organization's physical layout, and how employees are rewarded
-are the essence of organizational culture, whereas most others (including the authors of this book) view artifacts as symbols or indicators of culture.
-In other words, culture is cognitive (values and assumptions inside people's heads) whereas artifacts are observable manifestations of that culture.
-Either way, artifacts are important because they represent and reinforce an organization's culture.
-provide valuable evidence about a company's culture.18
-An organization's ambiguous (fragmented) culture is best understood by observing workplace behavior, listening to everyday conversations among staff and with customers, studying written documents and emails, viewing physical structures and settings, and interviewing staff about corporate stories. In other words, to truly understand an organization's culture, we need to sample information from a variety of organizational artifacts.

-The size, shape, location, and age of buildings both reflect and influence an organization's culture. Buildings might support a company's emphasis on teamwork, environmental friendliness, hierarchy, or any other set of values
-Even if the building doesn't make much of a statement, there is a treasure-trove of physical artifacts inside. Desks, chairs, office space, and wall hangings (or lack of them) are just a few of the items that might convey cultural meaning.28
-Each physical artifact alone might not say much, but put enough of them together and an image begins to form of how they symbolize the organization's culture.
-For example, one prominent workspace design and manufacturing company recently identified the workspace features typically found at companies with several different cultures. Exhibit 13.3 Page 305summarizes the physical space design of collaborative and creative cultures compared to cultures that emphasize efficiency (control) and competition. Collaborative and creative cultures value more teamwork and flexibility, so space design is informal and enables spontaneous group discussion. Controlling and competitive cultures tend to have more structural office arrangements and provide more space for individual work than teamwork.

-The founder's personality, values, habits, and critical events all play a role in establishing the firm's core values and assumptions.
-The founder is often an inspiring visionary who provides a compelling role model for others to follow.
-In later years, organizational culture is reinforced through stories and legends about the founder that symbolize the core values.
-Although founders usually establish an organization's culture, subsequent leaders need to actively guide, reinforce, and sometimes alter that culture.58
-The process of leading cultural change is associated with both transformational leadership and authentic leadership (see Chapter 11).
-In each of those models, leaders base their words and actions on personal values, and those values potentially become a reflection of the organization's values.
-For instance, one recent study found that the preferred conflict-handling style of leaders influences the work unit's or organization's cultural expectations on how employees address conflict situations.
-Another study reported that work units or companies with strong servant leadership were more likely to have a culture that valued providing service to others

Learning
-because newcomers try to make sense of the company's physical workplace, social dynamics, and strategic and cultural environment.
-They learn about the organization's performance expectations, power dynamics, corporate culture, company history, and jargon.
-They also need to form successful and satisfying relationships with other people from whom they can learn the ropes.72 In other words, effective socialization supports newcomers' organizational comprehension. It accelerates development of an accurate cognitive map of the physical, social, strategic, and cultural dynamics of the organization.
-Ideally, this learning should be distributed over time to minimize information overload.

adjusting
-process because individuals need to adapt to their new work environment.
-They develop new work roles that reconfigure their social identity, adopt new team norms, and practice new behaviors.73
-The adjustment process is fairly rapid for many people, usually occurring within a few months.
-However, newcomers with diverse work experience seem to adjust better than those with limited previous experience, possibly because they have a larger toolkit of knowledge and skills to make the adjustment possible.

-The preemployment socialization stage encompasses all the learning and adjustment that occurs before the first day of work. In fact, a large part of the socialization adjustment process occurs during this stage
-The main problem with preemployment socialization is that outsiders rely on indirect information about what it is like to work in the organization. This information is often distorted by inherent conflicts that arise during the mating dance between employer and applicant.77 One conflict occurs between the employer's need to attract qualified applicants and the applicant's need for complete information to make accurate employment decisions. Many firms describe only positive aspects of the job and company, causing applicants to accept job offers with incomplete or false expectations.
-Another conflict that prevents accurate exchange of information occurs when applicants avoid asking important questions about the company because they want to convey a favorable image to their prospective employer. For instance, applicants usually don't like to ask about starting salaries and promotion opportunities because it makes them seem greedy or aggressive. Yet, unless the employer provides this information, applicants might fill in the missing details with false assumptions that produce inaccurate expectations.
-Two other types of conflict tend to distort preemployment information for employers. Applicants engage in impression management when seeking employment, motivating them to hide negative information, act out of character, and occasionally embellish information about their past accomplishments. At the same time, employers are sometimes reluctant to ask some types of questions or use potentially valuable selection devices because they might scare off applicants. Unfortunately, employers form inaccurate expectations about job candidates because they receive exaggerated résumés and are often reluctant to ask for more delicate information from those applicants.

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