Exhibit 10.1. The Assumptions of the Three Organizational Subcultures.

1. The Operator Culture (organization based)

 The action of any organization is ultimately the action of people (operators)
 The success of the enterprise therefore depends on people’s knowledge, skill, and
commitment
 The knowledge and skill required are local and based on the organization’s “core technology”
 No matter how carefully engineered the production process is or how carefully rules and
routines are specified, operators will have to deal with unpredictable contingencies
 Therefore, operators have to have the capacity to learn and to deal with surprises
 Because most operations involve interdependencies between separate elements of the
process, operators must be able to operate as a collaborative team in which openness and
mutual trust are highly valued
2. The Engineering Culture (global community)
 Nature can and should be mastered: “That which is possible should be done”
 Operations should be based on science and available technology
 The most fun is solving puzzles and overcoming problems
 Products and outcomes should be useful and be improvements
 Solutions should be oriented toward elegance, simplicity, and precision: “Keep it neat and
simple”
 The ideal world is one of elegant machines and processes working in perfect precision and
harmony without human intervention
 People are the problem—they make mistakes and hence should be designed out of the
system wherever possible
3. The Executive Culture (global community)
 Without financial survival and growth there are no returns to shareholders or to society
 The economic environment is perpetually competitive and potentially hostile: “In a war one
cannot trust anyone”
 Therefore, the CEO must be the “lone hero,” isolated and alone, yet appearing to be
omniscient and in total control, and feeling indispensable: “I’m OK; after all, I’m here; they are
not OK; they have not made it to the top”

Exhibit 10.1. The Assumptions of the Three Organizational Subcultures, Cont’d.

 One cannot get reliable data from below because subordinates will tell one what they think
one wants to hear; therefore, as CEO one must trust one’s own judgment more and more
(i.e., lack of accurate feedback increases the sense of one’s own rightness and omniscience)
 Organization and management are intrinsically hierarchical; the hierarchy is the measure of
status and success and the primary means of maintaining control
 Because the organization is very large it becomes depersonalized and abstract, and,
therefore, has to be run by rules, routines (systems), and rituals (“machine bureaucracy”)
 Though people are necessary, they are a necessary evil, not an intrinsic value; people are a
resource like other resources, to be acquired and managed, not ends in themselves
 The well-oiled machine organization does not need whole people, only the activities that are
contracted for

designers are truly needed in order to invent new and better products and
processes, even though some of those processes make some people superfluous or
obsolete; and executives are truly needed to worry about the financial viability of the
whole organization even though that sometimes requires curbing expensive
innovations or laying people off. In terms of a competing values model described
above, the issue is how to align the goals of the three subcultures: focusing on doing
the job, remaining innovative to deal with changes in the environment, and staying
economically healthy. When one of these subcultures becomes too dominant, the
organization cannot survive—as was the case with DEC, where the engineering
innovation mentality overrode both the operations and executive cultures.
Summary and Conclusions
The value of typologies is that they simplify thinking and provide useful categories for
sorting out the complexities we must deal with when we confront organizational
realities. They provide categories for thinking and classifying, which is useful. The
weakness of culture typologies is that they oversimplify these complexities and may
provide us categories that are incorrect in terms of their relevance to what we are
trying to understand. They limit our perspective by prematurely focusing us on just a
few dimensions, they limit our ability to find complex patterns among a number of
dimensions, and they do not reveal what a given group feels intensely about.
Typologies also introduce a bias toward what Martin (2002) calls the “integration
perspective” in culture studies—an approach that emphasizes those dimensions on
which there is a high degree of consensus. She notes that many organizations are
“differentiated” or even “fragmented” to the extent that there is little consensus on
any cultural dimensions. An integrated culture is one in which the whole organization
shares a single set of assumptions; a differentiated culture is an organization in
which powerful subcultures disagree on certain crucial issues, such as labor and
management; and a fragmented culture is an organization such as a financial
conglomerate that has a great many subcultures and no single overarching set of
assumptions that are shared. Clearly the effort to classify a given organization into a
single typological category, such as “clan” or “networked,” presumes not only
integration around two dimensions but also the assumption that those dimensions
can be measured well enough to determine the degree of consensus.
Martin’s categories are a powerful way to describe organizations that have
different kinds of cultural landscapes within them, but they do not require any
redefinition of the basic concept of culture as a shared set of assumptions that is
taken for granted. It is then an empirical matter whether in a given organization we
find various levels of integration, differentiation, and/or fragmentation.
Typologies reflect organizational theory and can enhance theory. For example,
the distinction between the operator, engineering, and executive cultures within
organizations is derived from basic theory about labor and management but
elaborates that theory by sharpening the cultural distinctions between these three
groups and identifying the engineering/design/innovation group as a cultural
unit that is often overlooked. Having provided some conceptual categories and
cultural typologies, we must turn next to the problem of empirically deciphering
what is actually going on in a given organization. In the next chapter we address this
issue of how to assess cultural dimensions.