Planning Management: the organising organisational culture
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Organisational culture represents the different means in which it is ran and managed. Being the wonderful world that it is, things aren’t that simple, with a veritable cornucopia of different styles, different beliefs in how people should be managed. Without this cornucopia, it wouldn’t be terribly interesting. Of course there are overlaps - 4 categories, suggested by the American Dr Roger Harrison and refined by British Professor Charles Handy they are identified as: the club culture; the role culture ;the task culture;the person culture. Naturally, no one cultural is intrinsically better than any other, rather each functions best within certain circumstances.
Club Culture
Oft represented as a spider web, club culture revolves around the centre of the organisation - or the spider! Organisations with this management style, as its name suggests, functions very much like a club, with those closest to the proverbial spider wielding more influence.
Role Culture
The idea behind this organisational structure is that there are set roles or job-boxes for everyone. Here, it is the role not the person themself that are the most important. The structure is represented by a Greek Temple, with departmental ‘pillars’ being co-ordinated from the top.
Task Culture
A net, which can be flexible but always regroup is the chosen imagery for the task culture. The idea behind this is that teams of people would be applied to a task at hand, thus it can respond quicker than role culture nor as individualised as club or person cultures.
Person Culture
These aren’t organisations in so much as gathering of people. In traditional management structures, the skills and ability of a person is used to help achieve organisation’s goals, conversely Person Cultures use the organisation as a support network for the person.
As one of my classmate noted, Task culture seems to have planners written all over it. Planners, needing to create responses to shifting issues, need to posses the ability to respond with skill as well as the competency necessary to problem-solve. In preparation for this, we were given a questionnaire to fill out, identifying our preferred organisation cultures, my results were thus:
As our dear readers can see, I tend to favor Person and Task cultures. Despite the questionnaire being informal, I think the results reflect sufficently the sentiment which were passing through my head as I was reading about the cultures. To me, the appeal of task culture is its dynamism and fluidity. But as with all things, this comes at a cost of high operational…costs. In terms of person culture, it is the environment where the personal merits and knowledge rather than the individualism that attracts me.
Like the authors noted, there are actually very few organisations that are purely of a single culture form. In terms of the implications for me from this topic, it has, overall been an enlightening experience. Whilst it may have shown the environments, being abstracted concepts, it all still depends on each individual organisation as well as an experience before anything can be known for certain. Whilst in understanding organisation cultures, in practice, as job-hunters it doesn’t serve much purpose. In light of today’s economic climate, one has to be pragmatic and are not afforded the luxury with which to pick and choose. (as an aside, I recall reading somewhere that the economic climate in which a student graduates sets for their life their likely financial success. The reasoning being that as job markets become competitive, a graduate’s expectations are lowered. Hence, should my graduation coincide with worsening economic conditions the appeal of post graduate degrees grows)
Finally, I just want to tie in organisation cultures with our studio project/ group work. Perhaps by some serendipitous act or providence of god, we seem to operate within a mix of task and person culture. Whilst the environment is conducive to work for me, my failure in time management and my relishing in procrastination is not.
