Ist Unternehmenskultur "machbar"?

Du bist beim Habelt nicht wahr? Diese Frage wär jedenfalls typisch für ihn. Schreibe gerade selbst bei ihm eine Seminararbeit und habe genügend Bücher hier. Wenn ich die Zeit finden sollte, dann lese ich einmal nach und poste es dann hier. Werde jedenfalls über das Wochenende einmal in meinen Büchern nachsehen.

Gruß

Markus

Hier mal etwas zur Machbarkeit und Änderbarkeit einer Corporate Culture:

Managers can modify the visible aspects of culture, such as the language, stories, rites, rituals, and sagas. They can change the lessons to be drawn from common stories and even encourage individuals to see the reality they see. Because of their positions, senior managers can interpret situations in new ways and can adjust the meanings attached to important corporate events. They can create new rites and rituals. This takes time and enormous energy, but the long-run benefits can also be great.
Top managers, in particular, can set the tone for a culture and for cultural change. Managers at Aetna Life and Casualty Insurance built on its humanistic traditions to provide basic skills to highly motivated but underqualified individuals. Even in the highly cost-competitive steel industry, Chairperson F. Kenneth Iverson of Nucor built on basic entrepreneurial values in U.S. society to reduce the number of management levels by half. And at Procter and Gamble, Richard Nicolosi evoked the shared values for greater participation in decision making dramatically to improve creativity and innovation. Each of these examples illustrates how managers can help foster a culture that provides answers to important questions concerning external adaptation and internal integration. Recent work on the linkages among corporate culture and financial performance reaffirms the importance of an emphasis on helping employees adjust to the environment. It also suggests that emphasis alone is not sufficient. Neither is an emphasis solely on stockholders or customers associated with long-term economic performance. Instead, managers must work to emphasize all three issues simultaneously. This emphasis on customers, stockholders, and employees comes at a cost of emphasizing management. Large offices, multimillion-dollar salaries, golden parachutes (protections for executives if the firm is bought by others), as well as the executive plane, dining room, and country club are out.
Early research on culture and culture change often emphasized direct attempts to alter the values and assumptions of individuals by resocializing them—that is, trying to change their hearts so that their minds and actions would follow.146 The goal was to establish a clear, consistent organizationwide consensus. More recent work suggests that unified approach of working through values may not be either possible or desirable. Trying to change people’s values from the top down without also changing how the organization operates and recognizing the importance of individuals does not work very well. Take a look at Cisco Systems. Here managers realize that keeping a dynamic, change-oriented and fun culture is a mix of managerial actions, decisions about technology, and initiatives from all employees. The values are not set and imposed from someone on high. The shared values emerge, and they are not identical across all of Cisco’s operating sites. Subtle but important differences emerge across their operations in Silicon Valley, the North Carolina operation, and the Australian setting.
It is also a mistake for managers to attempt to revitalize an organization by dictating major changes and ignoring shared values. Although things may change a bit on the surface, a deeper look often shows whole departments resisting change and many key people unwilling to learn new ways. Such responses may indicate that the managers responsible are insensitive to the effects of their proposed changes on shared values. They fail to ask whether the changes are contrary to the important values of participants within the firm, a challenge to historically important corporatewide assumptions, and inconsistent with important common assumptions derived from the national culture, outside the firm. Note the example of Stephen Jobs at Apple earlier in chapter. He did not make all the changes. Rather, he worked with others to make changes in strategy, structure, products, and marketing and to build on deep-seated common assumptions that long-term employees shared. Few executives are able to reshape common assumptions or “the taken-forgranted truths” in a firm without taking drastic, radical action. Roger Smith of General Motors realized challenge and established a new division to produce the Saturn.
At Harley Davidson, a new senior management team had to replace virtually all of the company’s middle managers in order to establish a new, unique, and competitive culture. All too often, however, executives are unable to realize that they, too, can be captured by the broadly held common assumptions within their firms. Just as executives in Eastern European firms must reexamine the philosophical foundation of their firms as their countries adopt market economies, so must managers in the United States and other Western nations, as they anticipate the exciting challenges of a new century.

Quelle: HUNT, J. G. / OSBORN, R.N. / SCHERMERHORN, J. R.: Organizational Behavior, 7th Ed., Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2002, S.52f.

Grundsätzlich ist die Leitbildplanung, Schaffung einer Corporate Culture usw. in der Organisationsentwicklung veranckert. Eine gewisse Kultur ist sicherlich von Beginn an in der Organisation vorhanden, verändert sich aber im Zeitverlauf. Man kann davon ausgehen, dass die Kultur in einer Vision entsteht.

Im Mittelpunkt einer Teilveränderungsphase steht der Aufbau einer Vision, in dieser steht auch die Business Idea oder das Mission Statement (Geschäftsidee). Die Vision entspricht einem Bild der Zukunft ("Dream with a deadline") und soll dem Unternehmen eine Spitzenposition am Markt sichern. Gut Beispiele hierfür sind SAP, Apple, The Body Shop, Danzas' usw. Die Vision wird auf allen Unternehmensebenen entwickelt, d.h. beginnend vom CEO bis zur Bottom Line, das alles geschieht im Gegenstromverfahren, d.h. im Verlaufe der Zeit wird der Visionentwurf wieder von der Bottom Line nach oben gegeben. Man spricht hier auch von einem iterativen Veränderungsprozess. Der Visionentwurf ist damit Grundlage für das Unternehmensleitbild, welche die Grundlage einer Corportae Cultur ist.

Quelle: FOPP, L. / SCHIESSL, J.-C.: Business change als neue Managementdisziplin: Wie der chief change officer den Unternehmenswandel mitgestaltet, Frankfurt am Main / New York: Campus, 1999, S.71ff.

Hört sich alles komplizierter an als es ist, aber aus diesen Info's kannst du dir ja ein bis zwei Argumente herausziehen und das sollte dann jedenfalls für die Prüfung reichen. Viel Glück.

Gruß

Markus