Can cultures be managed within organisations?

Can cultures be managed within organisations?

What is culture? In a society a culture means how the human behave with in it. Organizational culture is basically the same even though over the years the definition has changed. Organisational Culture is several people interacting with each other for the purpose of accomplishing some goal in their defined environment.

There is a link between Job satisfaction and an organisations culture. Job satisfaction was positively related to clan and adhocracy cultures, and negatively related to market and hierarchy cultures (Lund 2003).

Netflix Culture Problem

Netflix started out as an DVD-by-mail service. The company was one of the first to see the potential of streaming technology and began to transition to a subscription video-on-demand model in 2007. Since this transition, annual revenue has grown from 1.2 billion to over 11.6 billion in just ten years (Topic: Netflix 2019).

Shalini Ramachandran and Joe Flint of The Wall Street Journal interviewed 70 current and former Netflix employees, picking apart the culture describing the environment as “ruthless, demoralizing and transparent to the point of dysfunctional.”

According to Glassdor.com, website where current and former employees anonymously review companies and their management, we can see the employee’s thoughts about the organizational culture (Figure 1)

                                              Figure 1; Source: glassdoor.com

Netflix has a move-fast-and-break-things culture. Netflix has a policy of firing employees who they find only adequate. The employee retention and job satisfaction in the company is not good. According to more than 800 anonymous employee reviews on company-rating website Glassdoor, Netflix has an approval rating of 3.7 out of 5. You can also see this in Figure 1.

A change in the company culture is required.

ICEBERG MODEL

                               Figure 2; Source; waterpowermagazine.com

Culture can be defined as how things are done within an organisation and provides guidance for individuals within the organisation to achieve their goals (Hemerling et al. 2018). The iceberg model shows an iceberg in the middle of the ocean. If we look at it from the side, we can see the visible part on top the ocean and the invisible part below the ocean.

Behavioural aspects like the attitude of the employee, personality, communication, which is often overlooked at the bottom of the iceberg. These aspects affect the productivity and quality of the workplace most of the time.

Netflix has some challenges when it comes to the following

1. Job satisfaction
2. Resistance to change
3. Low Job Security
4. Low Team Morale

    Handy’s Four Classes of Culture

                     Figure 3; source: readytomanage.com

When we look at the handy’s four classes of culture in figure 3, we can conclude that Netflix houses a power culture. The other classes are task oriented, role oriented, person oriented. This was popularised by Charles Handy in 1999

Hofstede’s Cultural Dimensions

                                                                             Source; Figure 3: business-to-you.com

The six dimensions are labelled:

1. Power Distance, related to the different solutions to the basic problem of human inequality

2. Uncertainty Avoidance, related to the level of stress in a society in the face of an unknown future

3. Individualism versus Collectivism, related to the integration of individuals into primary groups

 4. Masculinity versus Femininity, related to the division of emotional roles between women and men

5. Long Term versus Short Term Orientation, related to the choice of focus for people’s efforts: the future or the present and past.

 6. Indulgence versus Restraint, related to the gratification versus control of basic human desires related to enjoying life.

 Each country has been positioned relative to other countries through a score on each (Hofstede 2019)

Cultural Web

                                                 Figure 4; Source: toolshero.com

In figure 4, you can see the cultural web.

A leader can restore organizational culture using cultural web frameworks. First, it is necessary to align individual values and organizational values. Identifying the problems and areas of dissatisfaction with organizational culture is important to the leader. Observation and the company help to inform a leader about the approach to engage in situations improvement.

Recommendation

The problem in Netflix came because it was too transparent, and it has an adverse effect on the employees. The employee’s satisfaction became low and the company faced a tough situation on how to make the workplace more enjoyable. The employees raised their voices on the internet and there were a lot of publication that were quick to report on this.

References

Lund, D. (2003) “Organizational Culture And Job Satisfaction”. Journal Of Business & Industrial Marketing 18 (3), 219-236

Topic: Netflix (2019) available from <https://www.statista.com/topics/842/netflix/&gt; [13 April 2019]

Hemerling, J., Kilmann, J., Danoesastro M., Stutts L. & Ahern C. (2018) It’s Not a Digital Transformation Without a Digital Culture [online] available from< https://www.bcg.com/en-gb/publications/2018/not-digital-transformation-without-digital-culture.aspx&gt; [2 February 2019]

Hofstede, G. (2019) Dimensionalizing Cultures: The Hofstede Model In Context [online] available from <https://scholarworks.gvsu.edu/orpc/vol2/iss1/8/&gt; [14 April 2019]