A typology of organisational cultures

Ron Westrum in 2004 I wrote an interesting year. article About the typology of organizational cultures in the medical journal Qual Saf Health Care. This article is referenced by the authors of Accelerate when they talk about "Westrum organizational culture." So I decided to read the original article and make up my mind. At the beginning of the article, the author says that his typology of organizational cultures is based on the style of information processing in medical units. He further defines culture as an organizational pattern of response to challenges and opportunities and identifies three types of cultures.

• Pathological. (pathological) It is a type of culture that focuses on influence.
• Bureaucratic. (bureaucratic) It is a type of culture that is rule-oriented.
• Productive. (generative) It is a type of culture that focuses on performance. He goes on to say that these types of cultures are driven by the attitudes of unit leaders to which their employees respond. The attached image has a short list of the characteristics of each of the cultures, but I especially like the quote: When things go wrong, pathological climates encourage finding a scapegoat, bureaucratic organisations seek justice, and the generative organisation tries to discover the basic problems with the system. Separately, the author notes that his scheme captures only part of the organizational culture, but says nothing about training, structure, style of problem solving and so on. Plus, he notes that his findings about the relationship between culture type and performance are statistical. (correlation)rather than determinate (causation). The part of the article about the case study deals more deeply with the topic of reaction to anomalies and is noted. 6 reactionary *- Supression - harming or stopping the person bringing the anomaly to light; "shooting the messenger"
• Encapsulation - isolating the messenger, so that the message is not heard
• Public relations - putting the message "in context" to minimise its impact
• Local fix - responding to the presenting case, but ignoring the possibility of others elsewhere
• Global fix - an attempt to respond to the problem wherever it exists. Common in aviation, when a single problem will direct attention to similar ones elsewhere
• Inquiry - attempting to get at the "root causes" of the problem* By the way, the last version of the reaction is accepted in good IT companies in the format of a culture of post-mortems, about which I have already somehow told.

In conclusion, the authors show why information is so important to medical teams. Because most medical work involves teams, information will provide the glue that keeps the team focused and coordinated. If the glue is weak, so will the team be. The culture, then, represents those habits of thought and action by changing the culture, virtually everything can change—trust, openness, confidence, and even competence Well, further conclusions for clinical practice and key conclusions of the article are given. (You can read them on images from post).

#Culture #Management #Leadership #SRE #Software #Processes #Engineering #Thinking