Organizational Subcultures in a Soft Bureaucracy: Resistance Behind the Myth and Facade of an Official Culture

Abstract

T his paper uses case studies and survey data to explore the relationship between organizational culture and effectiveness. The results provide evidence for the existence of four cultural traits-involvement, consistency, adaptability, and mission-and indicate that these characteristics are positively related to perceptions of performance as well as to objective measures such as return on assets and sales growth. Organizational culture is found to be measurable and to be related to important organizational outcomes.

‘Being yourself ’ in the electronic sweatshop: New forms of normative control

“…Repetitive and standardized rule following can result in a crippling sense of dullness, amplified by the administrative aim to depersonalize the bureaucratic role. Moreover, because bureaucracy is founded upon an authoritarian 'rule of law' demanding conformity, the resistance it can evoke is likely to take the form of various antiauthoritarian gestures (Jermier et al, 1991).…”

Leader distance: a review and a proposed theory

“…According to Meyer et al (1993), what can be termed as the "configurational approach" to studying organizational, group, and individual-level phenomena typically leads to clusters of configurations or typologies that can be conceptually (e.g., Smith & Foti, 1998) or empirically derived (e.g., Jermier, Slocum, Fry, & Gaines, 1991). The typology-in this case the "distance style" adopted by the leader-is useful as a unit of analysis because the variables of which it is comprised cannot be studied alone or additively (Meyer et al, 1993;Smith & Foti, 1998).…”

Generational Sub-cultures: Generation Y a Sub-culture?

“…Suggestions include personal characteristics, personal biographies, positional characteristics, and task exigencies (Jermier, Slocum, Fry, & Gaines, 1991); departmental groupings, geographical distribution, and the influence of a specific manager (Martins & Von der Ohe, 2006); and shared experiences and the set-up of the organisation (Crough, 2012). Not all of these sources will necessarily form sub-cultures within an organisation, and Simons and Rowland (2011) make an important point that despite the presence or absence of sub-cultures, the organisation itself still serves as a point of connection for individuals and groups.…”

“…Some scholars propose that the appearance of a singular organisational culture is reserved for the external public, while the internal reality of organisations is various interlocking, nested and sometimes conflicting sub-cultures (Jermier et al, 1991;. Lok, Westwood, and Crawford (2005) support this notion and comment that organisational culture as a construct applied to the whole of an organisation is useful in differentiating one organisation from another in inter-organisational studies, but it has limitations when trying to explain people's intra-organisational behaviour because of the complexity of sub-cultures present.…”