Leadership And Organizational Behavior

"Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed people can change the world. Indeed. It is the only thing that ever has."

Margaret Mead

In the past 25 years, the concept of organizational culture has gained wide recognition as a way to understand human systems.

The culture of a group can now be defined as: A pattern of shared basic assumptions that the group learned as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore, to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems. â„- (Schein 373-374)

Introduction

During more than 4 years I was working for 3 different non-profit organizations in the Bay Area. The known fact is that non-profits don't state a profit as a main purpose of their operations. They declare the service of the public interests is as the most important goal. The short trait of cultural background of non-profit companies would be 'The culture of giving'.

This statement describes well the California Birth Defect Monitoring Program (CBDMP), the medium-sized non-profit organization where I was working for two years.

The company is located in Berkeley and many employees are graduates from UC Berkeley, residing in the city. We all are familiar with democratic and radical culture of this town and the location of the company is actually affects its culture. People are very liberal, relaxed and are free in an expression of them selves.

The structure of CBDMP might be presented as following:

CBDMP Structure

Board of Directors

Management group

Research Analysts IT Group Computer Programmers

Administrative Staff

There are four teams divided by specification of tasks they do and small group of managers, who supervises the performance of all groups.

Identifying the problems

As many other non-profits CBDMP has some organization problems. Working there I have been witnessing the increase of absenteeism and turnover, lack of communication between management group and staff, as well as within different teams.

The other big problems were low level of job satisfaction and lack of motivation. People did not want to be involved in projects, try to escape challenging work.

In addition, I noticed occurrence of an unhealthy competition between employees, damaging opposition between teams and high level of approval seeking behavior across all levels in company.

The next step in my research was to determine if these problems are single events or there are real organizational problems. Looking at the past history of CBDMP and the observing the frequency of occurrence of negative events overall I can hypothesize that the company had increased the level of Aggressive/Defensive style as well as Passive/Defensive style.

Research

In order to prove my hypotheses, I tried to create the CBDMP Cultural Profile, applying the OCI measurements and some Statistical Analysis tools. I collected the data from five coworkers and tried to analyze it, using graphics.

The Figure1 shows the differences in answers of each employee, including myself.

The Figure 4 demonstrates an average score of all collected answers and proves the results showed in Figure1.

Based on those results, I could distinguish the CBDMP as an organization with Primary Constructive Cultural Style.

The company had collected high scores in the Affiliative (48), Humanistic-Encouraging (46), Self-Actualizing (44) and Achievement (42) positions, which are styles, fitting into Constructive oriented culture. All the Constructive cultural norms, described in OCI, are consistent with the CBDMP cultural environment. The statements such as creativity values over conformity, cooperation values over competition and quality over quantity can be exact characteristics of the company's values.

I believe the reason for that lies in the particularity of the mission of the CBDMP. The most important outcome of entire company operation is scientific publications and statistical reports. Thus, the quality of data collection and statistical analysis is essential. In order to achieve the excellence, employees require to be innovative, good team players and detail oriented.

Following the OCI classification, I tend to categorize the CDBMP as "A Learning organization... the organization that emphasizes improvement and system-wide approach to quality" І. In addition, in terms of Organizational Level this company can be classified as an Inter-unit coordination type of organization.

Overall, I agree with the result of OCI test. I remember John Harrison's (the director of CBDMP) famous saying was 'Family is the first priority and work is the second'.

I gave this example as an illustration of the CBDMP humanistic propensity.

According to OCI, in organizations with constructive style people encourage to work toward the satisfaction of whole company as well as each employee's needs. This statement fits well into CBDMP culture: the company was always very supportive to all employees in their professional development and training. I personally had about six company paid trainings.

It was interesting to compare the CBDMP profile to the "Typical Ideal Culture