A Typology of Organisational Cultures
The source of the pathological, bureaucratic and generative typology, written for a medical audience and more tentative than its later reputation suggests. Culture is defined as an organisation's patterned response to the problems and opportunities it meets, and the tractable way in is information flow: not merely how much moves from A to B but its relevance, timeliness and fitness for the recipient. Three types follow from what leaders are preoccupied with. A focus on personal power and glory produces the pathological, a focus on rules, position and departmental turf the bureaucratic, and a focus on the mission itself the generative. Leaders set this through symbolic action, reward and punishment; the workforce reads the signs and the culture follows. The table everyone reproduces is here: messengers shot, neglected or trained; bridging discouraged, tolerated or encouraged; failure leading to scapegoating, justice or inquiry; novelty crushed, problematised, or implemented.
The mechanism is given as three variables the climate shapes. Alignment, meaning whether people identify with the mission, with their own department, or with a person or clique. Awareness, whether people are told what bears on their work, illustrated by Hubble technicians jury-rigging a measuring rod without knowing they were creating a multi-billion dollar fault. And empowerment, since the ability to think tends to be coextensive with the ability to act: Columbia's managers made little effort to obtain in-flight photographs once they believed nothing could be done. A companion scheme classifies responses to anomaly as suppression, encapsulation, public relations, local fix, global fix or inquiry, suppression marking the pathological and inquiry the generative.
Three things are worth carrying from the paper that the popular version drops. The relationship between climate and performance is stated as statistical rather than deterministic, plenty of effective organisations are not generative, and the typology is silent on training, structure and problem-solving style. Evidence is thin and said to be: case studies plentiful, systematic tests rare, a 1986 study linking intensive care cooperation to lower mortality unsupported on follow-up, and the correlation called a hypothesis whose reasons are still being explored. The confirmation leaned on hardest is Edmondson's 1996 nursing study, acknowledged as not designed to test the typology, whose tenfold difference in error reporting is read carefully as a difference in reporting rather than in errors made.
The paper is also the origin of a claim about mutability that gets quoted without its caveat. Culture can change with new leadership, as on the USS Benfold in a few months, but set against that are the regional Italian cultures Putnam studied, stable across centuries, and a warning that a generative unit inside a larger unsympathetic organisation may become a target rather than a model, as happened to the naval laboratory Westrum studied. Context is not optional here, though it is the first thing dropped when the table is reproduced on a slide.
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