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Rethinking Organizational Culture: The Role of Generational Subcultures

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Abstract

The construct of culture is receiving growing attention in the field of organizational studies due to its influence on many facets of the organizational life and several changes that are affecting nowadays organizations (e.g. internationalization, ageing, technology, etc.). Indeed culture is not static but it reflects the stages of the company development and changes occurring in the external environment. Moreover, there can be many subcultures within any organization each of them sharing different set of values and beliefs, expectations and patterns of appropriate behaviors. The simultaneous presence of these cultural groups have an impact on subsequent behaviors of firm members and can in turn influence the overall corporate culture. This is the case of the new generational mix that is characterizing the workforce with each generational group characterized by a different set of work values. The purposes of this essay are twofold. First, to provide a review of the concept of organizational culture by presenting the main theoretical frameworks and methodological issues involved in organizational culture research. The goal here is to relate organizational culture to other cultures simultaneously existing within companies such as national and generational culture. Second, to underline the importance of studying generation subcultures’ influence on organizational culture due to the expected shift in the prevailing set of work values.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Connection: Compare all this layers of collective culture with, on the one hand, the “toolkit view” of culture defined in Sect. 2.4 (see Connection therein). The focus on single agents rather than on groups can be seen in economics (Sect. 12.2), educational studies (Chap. 5), and psychology of multicultural minds (Chap. 7). On the other hand, Sect. 10.3 defines culture and cultural traits emphasizing a collective point of view.

  2. 2.

    Connection: Mathematical models predicting the likelihood and effects of a trait ‘invading’ and organization are possible. For some approaches, see Chaps. 11 and 12.

  3. 3.

    Connection: This role of leaders in organizational culture can perhaps be dialectically connected with the psychoanalytic process of identification, in which we find a different concept of trait (Chap. 6).

  4. 4.

    Connection: For a discussion of national identities, see Chap. 3. For an analysis of the encounter between different “cultural syndromes” see Chap. 7.

  5. 5.

    Connection: This stability is also a hypothesis of the socialization processes in economic theories of cultural transmission, as in Sect. 12.4.

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  1. “Riccardo Massa” Department of Educational Human Sciences, University of Milano - Bicocca, Milan, Italy

    Alessandra Lazazzara

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  1. Alessandra Lazazzara
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  1. Paris School of Economics, Paris, France

    Fabrizio Panebianco

  2. CISEPS-CenterforInterdisciplinaryStudies, University of Milano - Bicocca, Milano, Italy

    Emanuele Serrelli

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Lazazzara, A. (2016). Rethinking Organizational Culture: The Role of Generational Subcultures. In: Panebianco, F., Serrelli, E. (eds) Understanding Cultural Traits. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24349-8_14

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