Organizational Culture

4 Pages 1053 Words

Organizational Culture Julie Chase
John P. Kotter & James L. Heskett, May 13,2004
Corporate Culture and Performance

In their book, Corporate Culture and Performance, John Kotter and James Heskett attempt to put quantitative measures and analysis around the subject of corporate culture and its affect on corporate performance. As this book is quoted in several of the other readings for this study it would seem that it is considered to be an important book on the subject. It is a very interesting book but a reading of the appendix shows that the initial questionnaire used as the basis for the authors’ analysis consisted of a single question sent to the top six officers in 207 companies. The questionnaire reads: “Would you please rate firms competing in the _________ industry on the degree to which you feel their managers have been influenced in their decision making by a strong corporate culture? For purposes of this exercise, please associate a strong culture with affirmative responses to questions such as:
1. To what extent have managers in competing firms commonly spoken of a (company name) “style” or way of doing things?
2. To what extent has the firm both made its values known through a creed or credo and made a serious attempt to encourage managers to follow them? And
3. To what extent has the firm been managed according to longstanding policies and practices other than those of just the incumbent CEO?
Please rate the firms listed on the accompanying sheet on a scale of one to five….”
In The Corporate Culture Survival Guide by Edgar H. Schein, the author discusses the difficulties involved in discerning corporate culture and devotes much of his book to the process of understanding what a given corporate culture is. Given Schein analysis it seems that Kotter and Heskett’s approach was a little light. Be that as it may, Corporate Culture and Performance does provide a very interesting analysis...