2.3. Culture

What Is Organizational Culture?

When working with internal and external customers on a project, it is essential to pay close attention to relationships, context, history, and organizational culture. Organizational culture refers to the beliefs, attitudes, and values that the organization’s members share and the behaviours consistent with them. Also called corporate culture, it is what sets one organization apart from another and dictates how members of the organization will see you, interact with you, and sometimes judge you. Often, projects have a specific culture, work norms, and social conventions.

Some aspects of corporate culture are easily observed; others are more difficult to discern. You can easily observe the office environment and how people dress and speak. In one company, individuals work separately in closed offices; in another, teams may work in a shared environment. The more subtle components of corporate culture, such as the values and overarching business philosophy, may not be readily apparent, but they are reflected in member behaviours, symbols, and conventions used.

Values are stable, evaluative beliefs that guide a person or an organization in our preferences for outcomes or a certain course of action to be taken. It is about what is believed to be good or bad, right or wrong in the eyes of the person or organization.  When organizational culture is being discussed, it is often referred to as shared values or the values that everyone within the organization work toward as common goals.  Also, it refers to shared assumptions, which are seen as the real essence of the organization.  Shared assumptions are unconscious perceptions of people’s behaviour that are considered the “right way to think, act and behave.” They are ingrained within people and not easy to see.

This is where trained HR Specialists are able to observe employees’ behaviours and actions and then support them to “do” the right thing, to act and behave in the correct ways.  As well, HR Specialists provide training for Management on how to observe these behaviours. Or even provide training for employees to self-identify with their own actions and behaviours.

Core values are often defined in a company’s mission and/or vision statement.  Some examples of core values could include responsibility meaning a “green” working environment; accountability to employees and our customers; we are an inclusive work environment; are a leader through our innovation of products, and we are a work-life balance company.

Sometimes, the values statements do not align with what is actually practiced in the organization.  The values are what organizations want employees to believe and aspire to in the organization.  Some employees may have conflicting values with the organization. The way to influence employees to follow the values of the organization is for senior management to guide and practice the organization’s values.  In turn, it is hoped that employees will model the same behaviours and act in the same way.

Human Resources trainers can have a huge influence over aligning the employees with the organization’s values; and result in an organizational culture that is supported by its employees.

Culture and Environments

There are many factors that need to be understood within your project environment (Figure 2-7). At one level, you need to think in terms of the cultural and social environments (i.e., people, demographics, and education). The international and political environment is where you need to understand about different countries’ cultural influences. Furthermore, the physical environment of the project requires you to consider the impact of time zones. Think about how your project will be executed differently whether it is just in your country or if it involves an international project team that is distributed throughout the world in five different countries.

Of all the factors, the physical ones are the easiest to understand, and it is the cultural and international factors that are often misunderstood or ignored. How we deal with clients, customers, or project members from other countries can be critical to the success of the project. For example, the culture of the United States values accomplishments and individualism. Americans tend to be informal and call each other by first names, even if having just met. Europeans tend to be more formal, using surnames instead of first names in a business setting, even if they know each other well. In addition, their communication style is more formal than in the United States, and while they tend to value individualism, they also value history, hierarchy, and loyalty. The Japanese, on the other hand, tend to communicate indirectly and consider themselves part of a group, not as individuals. The Japanese value hard work and success, as most of us do.

The importance of understanding the organizational culture and strategy is important to projects. HR Specialists can play a role in assisting project managers in identifying the relationship between organizational culture and selection of projects. If the project does not align with the corporate culture and strategy, it could fail.  When independent decisions are made by different departments there is confusion and often conflict.  This can lead to unhappy customers.  Projects must be aligned with strategy that evolves from the corporate culture.  A selection process of priorities to the organization, and that align with its strategy and the project are the success markers.  Otherwise, companies waste people’s time, energy and money. Products and services need to be of high quality for customers.

How a product or service is received can be very dependent on the international cultural differences. For example, in the 1990s, when many large American and European telecommunications companies were cultivating new markets in Asia, their customer’s cultural differences often produced unexpected situations. Western companies planned their telephone systems to work the same way in Asia as they did in Europe and the United States. But the protocol of conversation was different. Call-waiting, a popular feature in the West, is considered impolite in some parts of Asia. This cultural blunder could have been avoided had the team captured the project environment requirements and involved the customer.

It is often the simplest things that can cause trouble since, unsurprisingly, in different countries, people do things differently. One of the most notorious examples of this is also one of the simplest: date formats. What day and month is 2/8/2021? Of course, it depends where you come from: in North America, it is February 8th while in Europe (and much of the rest of the world) it is 2nd August. Clearly, when schedules and deadlines are being defined it is important that everyone is clear on the format used.

The diversity of practices and cultures and its impact on products in general and on software in particular goes well beyond the date issue. You may be managing a project to create a new website for a company that sells products worldwide. There are language and presentation style issues to take into consideration; converting the site into different languages isn’t enough. It is obvious that you need to ensure the translation is correct; however, the presentation layer will have its own set of requirements for different cultures. The left side of a website may be the first focus of attention for a Canadian; the right side would be the initial focus for anyone from the Middle East, as both Arabic and Hebrew are written from right to left. Colours also have different meanings in different cultures. White, which is a sign of purity in North America (e.g., a bride’s wedding dress), and thus would be a favoured background colour in North America, signifies death in Japan (e.g., a burial shroud).

Table 2‑1 The meaning of colours in various cultures (Russo & Boor, 1993).

Project managers in multicultural projects must appreciate the culture dimensions and try to learn relevant customs, courtesies, and business protocols before taking responsibility for managing an international project. A project manager must take into consideration these various cultural influences and how they may affect the project’s completion, schedule, scope, completion and cost.   How the team meets and when they meet must be factored into the project timeline and deliverables.

Creating a Project Culture

Human Resources and Project Managers have a unique opportunity during the start-up of a project. They create a project culture, something organizational managers seldom have a chance to do. In most organizations, the corporate or organizational culture has developed over the life of the organization, and people associated with the organization understand what is valued, what has status, and what behaviours are expected. Edgar Schein identified three distinct levels in organizational culture.

1. Artifacts and behaviours: something valued by a certain culture. They are symbols and signs of an organization’s culture. They are observable. i.e., country’s flag, how people dress; how people conduct themselves around others, how people are greeted when entering a building.
2. Espoused values: values expressed by an organization, standards, what does the organization stand for (for example: mission statement, tag lines; honesty, trust, consistency, integrity).
3. Assumptions:  unknown and generally not written down, employee’s beliefs, perceptions, feelings.

Artifacts are the visible elements in a culture and they can be recognized by people not part of the culture. Espoused values are the organization’s stated values and rules of behaviour. Shared basic assumptions are the deeply embedded, taken-for-granted behaviours that are usually unconscious but constitute the essence of culture.

Characteristics of Project Culture

A project culture represents the shared norms, beliefs, values, and assumptions of the project team. This is very similar to the corporate culture. Understanding the unique aspects of a project culture and developing an appropriate culture to match the complexity profile of the project are important project management abilities.

Culture is developed through the communication of:

• The priority
• The given status
• The alignment of official and operational rules

Official rules are the rules that are stated, and operational rules are the rules that are enforced. Project managers who align official and operational rules are more effective in developing a clear and strong project culture because the project rules are among the first aspects of the project culture to which team members are exposed when assigned to the project.