Schein.ffirs 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page v Organizational Culture and Leadership Third Edition Schein.ffirs 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page ii Schein.ffirs 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page i Schein.ffirs 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page ii Schein.ffirs 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page iii Organizational Culture and Leadership Schein.ffirs 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page iv Edgar H. Schein Schein.ffirs 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page v Organizational Culture and Leadership Third Edition Schein.ffirs 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page vi Copyright © 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved. Published by Jossey-Bass A Wiley Imprint 989 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94103-1741 www.josseybass.com No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc., 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, 978-750-8400, fax 978-750-4470, or on the web at www.copyright.com. Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 111 River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, 201-748-6011, fax 201-748-6008, e-mail: [email protected]. Jossey-Bass books and products are available through most bookstores. To contact Jossey-Bass directly call our Customer Care Department within the U.S. at 800-956-7739, outside the U.S. at 317-572-3986 or fax 317-572-4002. Jossey-Bass also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schein, Edgar H. Organizational culture and leadership / Edgar H. Schein.—3rd ed. p. cm.—(The Jossey-Bass business & management series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-7879-6845-5 (alk. paper) 1. Corporate culture. 2. Culture. 3. Leadership. I. Title. II. Series. HD58.7.S33 2004 302.3'5—dc22 2004002764 Printed in the United States of America THIRD EDITION HB Printing 10987654321 Schein.ffirs 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page vii The Jossey-Bass Business & Management Series Schein.ffirs 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page viii Schein.ftoc 6/14/04 9:26 AM Page ix Contents Preface xi The Author xv Part One: Organizational Culture and Leadership Defined 1 1. The Concept of Organizational Culture: Why Bother? 3 2. The Levels of Culture 25 3. Cultures in Organizations: Two Case Examples 39 4. How Culture Emerges in New Groups 63 Part Two: The Dimensions of Culture 85 5. Assumptions About External Adaptation Issues 87 6. Assumptions About Managing Internal Integration 111 7. Deeper Cultural Assumptions About Reality and Truth 137 8. Assumptions About the Nature of Time and Space 151 9. Assumptions About Human Nature, Activity, and Relationships 171 10. Cultural Typologies 189 11. Deciphering Culture 203 ix Schein.ftoc 6/14/04 9:26 AM Page x x CONTENTS Part Three: The Leadership Role in Culture Building, Embedding, and Evolving 223 12. How Leaders Begin Culture Creation 225 13. How Leaders Embed and Transmit Culture 245 14. The Changing Role of Leadership in Organizational “Midlife” 273 15. What Leaders Need to Know About How Culture Changes 291 16. A Conceptual Model for Managed Culture Change 319 17. Assessing Cultural Dimensions: A Ten-Step Intervention 337 18. A Case of Organizational (Cultural?) Change 365 19. The Learning Culture and the Learning Leader 393 References 419 Index 429 Schein.fpref 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page xi Preface Organizational culture has come of age. Not only did the concept have staying power but it is even being broadened to occupational cultures and community cultures. Culture at the national level is more important than ever in helping us to understand intergroup conflict. As it turns out, culture is essential to understanding inter- group conflict at the organizational level as well. My years of con- sulting experience with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) provided useful case material (as the Action Company) in my pre- vious editions, but it was only through my attempt to fully under- stand why DEC initially succeeded—and, in the end, failed as a business—that I came to realize the true importance of organiza- tional culture as an explanatory concept. What happens in organi- zations is fairly easy to observe; for example, leadership failures, marketing myopia, arrogance based on past success, and so on; but in the effort to understand why such things happen, culture as a concept comes into its own (Schein, 2003). In an age in which leadership is touted over and over again as a critical variable in defining the success or failure of organizations, it becomes all the more important to look at the other side of the lead- ership coin—how leaders create culture and how culture defines and creates leaders. The first and second editions of this book attempted to show this connection, and I hope that I have been able to strengthen the connection even more in this third edition. The conceptual models of how to think about the structure and functioning of organizational culture, and the role that leadership plays in the creation and management of culture have remained xi Schein.fpref 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page xii xii PREFACE more or less the same in this third edition. However, I have been able to add material based on more recent clinical research and to make the concepts more vivid by identifying more of the organiza- tions with whom I have worked over the years. All of the chapters have been redone and edited. Some have been shortened; more have been lengthened with additional case material that I was able to incorporate. In addition, I have selec- tively incorporated relevant material from a great many other books and papers that have been written about organizational culture since the last edition. It is clear that there are still different models available to scholars and practitioners on how to think about cul- ture. I have not reviewed all of them in detail but have tried to show, wherever possible, variations in point of view. I apologize to those colleagues whose work I may have overlooked or chosen not to include, but my purpose is not to write the definitive textbook on culture; rather, it is to explore a way of thinking about culture that I believe best suits our efforts to understand groups, organizations, and occupations. This edition is organized into three parts. Part One focuses on organizational and occupational cultures—how to think about them, how to define them, and how to analyze them. Leadership is referred to throughout and leadership issues are highlighted, but the focus is clearly on getting a better feel for what culture is and does. Part Two focuses on the content of culture. In a sense, culture covers all of a given group’s life; hence the content is, in principle, endless and vast. Yet we need categories for analysis, and here we can draw on anthropology and group dynamics to develop a set of dimensions that are most likely to be useful in making some con- ceptual sense of the cultural landscape as applied to organizations. In Part Three the focus shifts to the leader as founder, manager, and, ultimately, a victim of culture if the leader does not understand how to manage culture. A crucial element in this analysis is to understand how culture coevolves with the organization as success Schein.fpref 6/14/04 9:25 AM Page xiii PREFACE xiii brings growth and aging. The issues that leaders face at each of these different organizational growth stages are completely differ- ent, partly because the role that culture plays at each stage is com- pletely different. This aspect of leadership is almost completely ignored in most leadership books. Acknowledgments My most profound gratitude is to the readers of the first and second edition. Were it not for their positive and critical feedback, and their use of this book in their courses and their consulting work, I would not have had the energy to write a third edition. Support and stimulation from colleagues again played a key role, especially the feedback from John Van Maanen, Otto Scharmer, Joanne Martin, Mary Jo Hatch, Majken Schultz, and Peter Frost. The publisher, Jossey-Bass, has always been totally encouraging and their editorial staff, especially Byron Schneider, urged me on relentlessly but in a positive and supportive way. The reviews they provided were essential to gaining perspective on a book that was first published in 1985. I got many good ideas about what was work- ing and should be preserved, what needed to be cut out, and what needed to be added or enhanced. I thank each of them. I think it is also important to acknowledge the tremendous pos- itive impact of word processing technology. Work on this edition was launched with a set of chapters scanned in from the second edi- tion, permitting immediate on-line editing. Material from the first edition that I decided to bring back in the third edition could be scanned and immediately incorporated where it belonged. Feed- back from readers could be incorporated into the text directly and used or not used, without additional retyping. Final copy could be sent to the publisher directly on discs or electronically.