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Edgar Schein of the Sloan School of Management
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was interested in organizational culture.
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He produced what is perhaps the best known and most widely used model.
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He divided organizational culture into three levels: artifacts, values, and assumptions.
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That's what we'll look at in this video.
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Schein's three levels—artifacts, values, and assumptions—are rather like an iceberg.
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The most important bits are the parts you can't see.
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However, the bit you can see—the bit above the waterline—is the artifacts.
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Artifacts are the visible, surface elements of an organizational culture.
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They're what an outside observer would easily see.
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In this way, they are pretty similar to the symbols of the Johnson and Scholes model, which we looked at in another video.
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Typical examples include branding, furniture, colors, dress code, day-to-day rituals, and job titles.
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Stories—the stories that people tell about their organization—are also artifacts.
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They are readily visible to outsiders.
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Whilst artifacts are easy to observe, they can sometimes be difficult to understand.
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There's a lot of deeper stuff going on, and we need to excavate below that level to properly understand an organizational culture.
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Stories give us a good example of this.
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There are stories told outside the organization, and others told only inside the organization.
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These internal stories drive deeper levels.
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Critically, it's the interpretation of these stories—what they mean—that gives rise to the values and assumptions of the organization.
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The second level is the espoused values of the organization.
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These are the declared sets of values and the norms of behavior it expects of its members.
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They set out what should be done, how we should do it, and the choices we should make.
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Values dictate the way members of the organization interact with one another, behave, and represent their organization to the outside world.
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The organization often amplifies these espoused values by public statements—visible symbols, if you like—such as statements of values or organizational straplines that go with their branding and identity.
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Underpinning everything are the shared basic assumptions about the organization.
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These are the deep interpretations of the stories we tell about ourselves.
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They are the beliefs that people take for granted about the organization.
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They often go unnoticed and are rarely questioned.
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They're very similar to Johnson and Scholes' paradigm.
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If you want to understand the artifacts and values of an organization, you need to get to grips with the shared assumptions.
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In 1985, Edgar Schein described six basic types of assumption that form what Johnson and Scholes would describe as the organizational paradigm.
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These include assumptions about the truth and how we determine it;
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The importance of time and how we respect and use it;
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How space within the organization is owned and respected;
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Assumptions about human nature—whether people are inherently good or bad, whether they can change, whether behavior is fixed.
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This isn’t an academic discussion about what is right.
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It’s a set of assumptions held within the organization that drive its choices and its culture.
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The fifth type of assumption is about the relationship between the organization and its environment.
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This includes relationships between members and their environment.
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These assumptions drive important decisions, public perceptions, and future success.
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Finally, there are assumptions about social power and how people should relate to one another.
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This links closely to the French and Raven social power bases, which we looked at in another video.
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Assumptions about social power dictate behaviors like how power and responsibilities are allocated and respected.
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They influence the balance between cooperation and competition, collaboration versus independence, expected leadership styles, conflict resolution, and decision-making.
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Edgar Schein's three levels offer a simpler way to understand how organizations work than Johnson and Scholes' seven components.
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That simplicity makes it easy to use day to day.
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Recognizing culture means recognizing that below the visible artifacts are shared values and deep assumptions driving the culture.
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If you want to shift a culture, you must shift the assumptions that underpin everything.
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Changing some artifacts may help, but fundamentally, if you can't shift assumptions, you can't change culture.
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Please give a thumbs up if you liked this video.
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There’s loads more great management course content to come.
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Please subscribe and hit the notification bell so you don’t miss anything.
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I look forward to seeing you in the next video.
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In the meantime, keep learning.
