Question

How does an organization's culture impact the success of teamwork?

Have you ever experienced an environment or type of culture that has the same effect? Explain. (not psychology but it's the closest subject)

Answer 1

Organizational cultures have a different effect on different employees. In our last post, we talked about how business owners often allow recruits to decide if their company culture fits them or not. After all, not all of them can succeed in a fast-paced world of startups.

Similarly, controlled company culture is not for energized and creative people. Different cultures suit various types of teams, and each team can succeed or fail depending on the way things are done within the company.

Creative culture

Creative culture is perfect for smaller tech-industry businesses that rely heavily on agile frameworks. It is all about moving fast and breaking things. The point is to keep up with crazy world of software (and hardware) development.

This “unconventional” culture tends to use self-managed and remote teams, which require certain level of autonomy to function properly. Likewise, highly-structured teams have to struggle, as uncertainty and unpredictability will prevent them from reaching desired productivity.

Collaborative culture

Collaborative culture isn’t really for start-ups, but more for scale-ups which strive towards becoming an enterprise. Implementation of this culture implies a larger workforce, as well as the need to keep all employees involved in the process. Companies with collaborative cultures will most likely use matrix management and complex double and triple line reporting structures, so it is no surprise that they will rely on matrix teams.

Matrix teams are considered to be “middle ground” between flexible and rigid teams, as both “extremes” would struggle with the different aspect of collaborative culture. Creative, and flexible teams would be held back by consensus decision making, while rigid teams would lack clear leadership and straightforward set of rules to rely on.

Competitive culture

Competitive culture is for companies that are focused on individual results first, so encouraging “the team” to handle things may not be the best option. This is one of those cases when using a group instead of a team might be a good idea: There will be a lot of “superstars” competing, so expecting them to collaborate on a common goal would seem unnatural, to say the least.

As team success takes a back seat to individual accomplishments, gelled teams would fail to achieve what leaders of competitive culture companies consider to be a positive result.

Controlled culture

Controlled culture is meant for established enterprises that value highly structured and organized teams, which tend to follow the rules to the letter. Most of the time, they will utilize functional and operational teams as these have proven to provide the most stability to the already rigid culture.

Controlled culture is characterized by excessive bureaucracy and complex management mechanism which prevents creative and independent teams from reaching their full potential. What’s more, this approach will demoralize the creatives, as they will feel trapped without freedom to make decisions.

To conclude

If the company chooses a particular culture and implements it throughout all departments, “natural selection” will soon take its course: employees who feel that organizational culture suits them will stay within the organisation. Others will leave on their own accord.

However, if the company allows different cultures to operate in separate departments, itmay impact employee performance severely. For example, HR department has “written communication only” culture. On the other hand, in a marketing department, you can often overhear a loud conversation, discussion, and even laughter.

This “inequality” and “uneven treatment” will most likely cause rivalries among areas, and culminate in outright rebellion if not handled correctly. So, giving each department freedom to choose their own culture is usually NOT a good idea. All employees are equal in the eyes of the company and should be treated as such