Yesterday I attended the annual conference of the Management Accounting Research Group at LSE. I don't know much about management accounting so I have occasionally trotted along to this and it has always proved interesting. In 2013 they actually invited me to speak (you can even listen to me here, starting at 2.30)
The theme this year focused on business models, a notion that I have struggled with for some time, but there was much discussion about culture, principally about how to change organisational culture.
I noted some thoughts about culture in a blog post last November but yesterday's conversations prompted further thoughts.
It occurred to me that the assumption in these discussions is always that cultural change is needed after a crisis of some kind demonstrates some deficiency in the existing culture which needs to be improved.
But cultural change itself is not always a positive thing. In universities over the thirty plus years of my experience I have observed several significant cultural changes. The impetus to measure outcomes started with the quality assurance requirements imposed in the late 1980s/early 1990s and was reinforced by the introduction of the Research Assessment Exercise. While it could be argued that these were practical initiatives introduced to monitor the use of public funds, the unintended cultural consequences have never been properly recognised. Couple all this new funding arrangements, global competition to recruit students, and with individual VCs who feel they have to make their mark on appointment by tinkering with organisational structures without thinking through the consequences and you have a chaotic environment, where academics are under constant pressure to respond to measurable KPIs, and a managerialist culture.
Thirty years ago, the culture I worked in was collegiate and supportive: colleagues ate lunch together and there were many opportunities for the sort of informal conversations that can be very productive. Experimentation in teaching was actively encouraged. Academic staff were encouraged to participate in university administration via committee membership. All of this has gone. Managing an academic career is now a very different proposition. Early career researchers face immediate pressure to publish in high-ranking journals and to raise external funding. They will have research experience but have little opportunity to learn the craft of teaching - I learned by being able to team teach with more experienced colleagues but that's an expensive way of doing things and teaching seems to be a much more isolated experience now.
There was a sense of a shared purpose about the goals of the university, even though different faculties and departments operated in quite different ways. Academics were trusted as professionals. Lines of accountability were blurred. There were colleagues who didn't always pull their weight but peer pressure was strong and I think that is an important factor in how culture works.
The breakout group I was in yesterday thought that cultural change could be effected through change in systems and processes. An example given was a change in the process for reimbursing expenses: this could certainly lead to behavioural changes but is that really cultural change?
How can organisations defend themselves against adverse cultural change, whether imposed by external constraints or new senior management? Does such adverse change inevitably lead to crisis and a demand for a new and "better" culture? How can individuals within an organisation work to maintain a culture which has a proven history of achieving organisational goals?
Calls for cultural change seem to imply that individuals or groups within an organisation have favoured their own interests ahead of that of the organisation to an extent that causes a crisis. Is culture about ensuring that the interests of individuals are aligned with that of the organisation (thanks to MP for that thought)? If so, to what extent do they have to be aligned? Can some degree of non-alignment be positive, a catalyst for innovation?
A call for a change in culture is a convenient way of not blaming anyone. ,It wasn't me, or x or y, it was the culture to blame.
ReplyDeleteAt the same time corporate culture is one way of persuading people not to act in their short term interests by, eg shirking, theft or other kinds of opportunism. At its best it is an economical way of providing good service and ethical behaviour. At its worst it is a way of exploiting the labour force - eg through expecting long hours of unpaid overtime.
When people resist change it can be for two reasons - either the prospective change is expected to make them worse off, or the change affronts their culture. For example Jeremy Hunt attempts to portray the Junior Doctors dispute as being about pay and conditions, whereas the Junior Doctors are striking because his new contract is an assault on their culture of patient care and service.