Tài liệu tiếng Anh ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND LEADERSHIP

Organizational
Culture and
Leadership
Third Edition
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Organizational Culture
and Leadership
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Edgar H. Schein
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Organizational
Culture and
Leadership
Third Edition
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Copyright © 2004 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.
Published by Jossey-Bass
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Schein, Edgar H.
Organizational culture and leadership / Edgar H. Schein.—3rd ed.
p. cm.—(The Jossey-Bass business & management series)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-7879-6845-5 (alk. paper)
1. Corporate culture. 2. Culture. 3. Leadership. I. Title. II. Series.
HD58.7.S33 2004
302.3'5—dc22
2004002764
Printed in the United States of America
THIRD EDITION
HB Printing 10987654321
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The Jossey-Bass
Business & Management Series
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Contents
Preface xi
The Author xv
Part One: Organizational Culture
and Leadership Defined 1
1. The Concept of Organizational Culture: Why Bother? 3

2. The Levels of Culture 25
3. Cultures in Organizations: Two Case Examples 39
4. How Culture Emerges in New Groups 63
Part Two: The Dimensions of Culture 85
5. Assumptions About External Adaptation Issues 87
6. Assumptions About Managing Internal Integration 111
7. Deeper Cultural Assumptions About Reality
and Truth 137
8. Assumptions About the Nature of Time and Space 151
9. Assumptions About Human Nature, Activity,
and Relationships 171
10. Cultural Typologies 189
11. Deciphering Culture 203
ix
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Part Three: The Leadership Role in Culture Building,
Embedding, and Evolving 223
12. How Leaders Begin Culture Creation 225
13. How Leaders Embed and Transmit Culture 245
14. The Changing Role of Leadership in Organizational
“Midlife” 273
15. What Leaders Need to Know About How
Culture Changes 291
16. A Conceptual Model for Managed Culture Change 319
17. Assessing Cultural Dimensions: A Ten-Step
Intervention 337
18. A Case of Organizational (Cultural?) Change 365
19. The Learning Culture and the Learning Leader 393
References 419
Index 429

x CONTENTS
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Preface
Organizational culture has come of age. Not only did the concept
have staying power but it is even being broadened to occupational
cultures and community cultures. Culture at the national level is
more important than ever in helping us to understand intergroup
conflict. As it turns out, culture is essential to understanding inter-
group conflict at the organizational level as well. My years of con-
sulting experience with Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)
provided useful case material (as the Action Company) in my pre-
vious editions, but it was only through my attempt to fully under-
stand why DEC initially succeeded—and, in the end, failed as a
business—that I came to realize the true importance of organiza-
tional culture as an explanatory concept. What happens in organi-
zations is fairly easy to observe; for example, leadership failures,
marketing myopia, arrogance based on past success, and so on; but
in the effort to understand why such things happen, culture as a
concept comes into its own (Schein, 2003).
In an age in which leadership is touted over and over again as a
critical variable in defining the success or failure of organizations, it
becomes all the more important to look at the other side of the lead-
ership coin—how leaders create culture and how culture defines and
creates leaders. The first and second editions of this book attempted
to show this connection, and I hope that I have been able to
strengthen the connection even more in this third edition.
The conceptual models of how to think about the structure and
functioning of organizational culture, and the role that leadership
plays in the creation and management of culture have remained
xi

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more or less the same in this third edition. However, I have been
able to add material based on more recent clinical research and to
make the concepts more vivid by identifying more of the organiza-
tions with whom I have worked over the years.
All of the chapters have been redone and edited. Some have
been shortened; more have been lengthened with additional case
material that I was able to incorporate. In addition, I have selec-
tively incorporated relevant material from a great many other books
and papers that have been written about organizational culture
since the last edition. It is clear that there are still different models
available to scholars and practitioners on how to think about cul-
ture. I have not reviewed all of them in detail but have tried to
show, wherever possible, variations in point of view. I apologize to
those colleagues whose work I may have overlooked or chosen not
to include, but my purpose is not to write the definitive textbook on
culture; rather, it is to explore a way of thinking about culture that
I believe best suits our efforts to understand groups, organizations,
and occupations.
This edition is organized into three parts. Part One focuses on
organizational and occupational cultures—how to think about
them, how to define them, and how to analyze them. Leadership
is referred to throughout and leadership issues are highlighted,
but the focus is clearly on getting a better feel for what culture is
and does.
Part Two focuses on the content of culture. In a sense, culture
covers all of a given group’s life; hence the content is, in principle,
endless and vast. Yet we need categories for analysis, and here we
can draw on anthropology and group dynamics to develop a set of
dimensions that are most likely to be useful in making some con-

ceptual sense of the cultural landscape as applied to organizations.
In Part Three the focus shifts to the leader as founder, manager,
and, ultimately, a victim of culture if the leader does not understand
how to manage culture. A crucial element in this analysis is to
understand how culture coevolves with the organization as success
xii PREFACE
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brings growth and aging. The issues that leaders face at each of
these different organizational growth stages are completely differ-
ent, partly because the role that culture plays at each stage is com-
pletely different. This aspect of leadership is almost completely
ignored in most leadership books.
Acknowledgments
My most profound gratitude is to the readers of the first and second
edition. Were it not for their positive and critical feedback, and
their use of this book in their courses and their consulting work, I
would not have had the energy to write a third edition. Support and
stimulation from colleagues again played a key role, especially the
feedback from John Van Maanen, Otto Scharmer, Joanne Martin,
Mary Jo Hatch, Majken Schultz, and Peter Frost.
The publisher, Jossey-Bass, has always been totally encouraging
and their editorial staff, especially Byron Schneider, urged me on
relentlessly but in a positive and supportive way. The reviews they
provided were essential to gaining perspective on a book that was
first published in 1985. I got many good ideas about what was work-
ing and should be preserved, what needed to be cut out, and what
needed to be added or enhanced. I thank each of them.
I think it is also important to acknowledge the tremendous pos-
itive impact of word processing technology. Work on this edition
was launched with a set of chapters scanned in from the second edi-

tion, permitting immediate on-line editing. Material from the first
edition that I decided to bring back in the third edition could be
scanned and immediately incorporated where it belonged. Feed-
back from readers could be incorporated into the text directly and
used or not used, without additional retyping. Final copy could be
sent to the publisher directly on discs or electronically. Once errors
were corrected they stayed corrected. All of this is a most unusual
and pleasant experience for an author who can remember what
writing was like with carbons, ditto paper, and endless retyping.
PREFACE xiii
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Last but not least I thank my wife, Mary, for sitting by patiently
while I disappeared to work at the computer from time to time. But
she too has gotten hooked on the power of e-mail and other elec-
tronic marvels, so she is now more understanding of how screens
capture our attention.
May 2004 Edgar H. Schein
Cambridge, Massachusetts
xiv PREFACE
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The Author
Edgar H. Schein was educated at the University of Chicago; at
Stanford University, where he received a master’s degree in psy-
chology in 1949; and at Harvard University, where he received his
Ph.D. in social psychology in 1952. He was chief of the Social Psy-
chology Section of the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research
while serving in the U.S. Army as a captain from 1952 to 1956. He
joined the Sloan School of Management at the Massachusetts Insti-
tute of Technology (MIT) in 1956 and was made a professor of
organizational psychology and management in 1964.

From 1968 to 1971 Schein was the undergraduate planning
professor for MIT, and in 1972 he became the chairman of the
Organization Studies Group at the Sloan School, a position he
held until 1982. He was honored in 1978 when he was named the
Sloan Fellows Professor of Management, a chair he held until 1990.
At present he is Sloan Fellows Professor of Management Emer-
itus and continues at the Sloan School part time as a senior lec-
turer. He is also the founding editor of Reflections, the journal of
the Society for Organizational Learning, which is devoted to con-
necting academics, consultants, and practitioners around the issues
of knowledge creation, dissemination, and utilization.
Schein has been a prolific researcher, writer, teacher, and con-
sultant. Besides his numerous articles in professional journals, he
has authored fourteen books, including Organizational Psychology
(third edition, 1980), Career Dynamics (1978), Organizational Cul-
ture and Leadership (1985, 1992), Process Consultation Vol. 1 and Vol. 2
xv
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(1969, 1987, 1988), Process Consultation Revisited (1999), and The
Corporate Culture Survival Guide (1999).
Schein wrote a cultural analysis of the Singapore Economic
Development Board, entitled Strategic Pragmatism (MIT Press, 1997),
and he has published an extended case analysis of the rise and fall of
Digital Equipment Corporation, entitled DEC Is Dead; Long Live
DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation (Berrett-
Koehler, 2003). He was coeditor with the late Richard Beckhard of
the Addison Wesley Series on Organization Development, which has
published over thirty titles since its inception in 1969.
His consultation focuses on organizational culture, organization
development, process consultation, and career dynamics; among his

past and current clients are major corporations both in the U.S. and
overseas, such as Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Ciba-
Geigy, Apple, Citibank, General Foods, Procter & Gamble, Impe-
rial Chemical Industries (ICI), Saab Combitech, Steinbergs, Alcoa,
Motorola, Hewlett-Packard, Exxon, Shell, Amoco, Con Edison,
the Economic Development Board of Singapore, and the Interna-
tional Atomic Energy Agency (on the subject of “safety culture”).
Schein has received many honors and awards for his writing,
most recently the Lifetime Achievement Award in Workplace Learn-
ing and Performance of the American Society of Training Direc-
tors, February 3, 2000; the Everett Cherrington Hughes Award for
Career Scholarship from the Careers Division of the Academy of
Management, August 8, 2000; and the Marion Gislason Award for
Leadership in Executive Development from the Boston University
School of Management Executive Development Roundtable,
December 11, 2002.
He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association and
the Academy of Management. Schein is married and has three chil-
dren and seven grandchildren. He and his wife, Mary, live in Cam-
bridge, Massachusetts.
xvi THE AUTHOR
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Organizational Culture
and Leadership
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Part One
ORGANIZATIONAL
CULTURE AND
LEADERSHIP DEFINED

In this section of the book I will define the concept of culture and
show its relationship to leadership. Culture is both a dynamic phe-
nomenon that surrounds us at all times, being constantly enacted
and created by our interactions with others and shaped by leader-
ship behavior, and a set of structures, routines, rules, and norms that
guide and constrain behavior. When one brings culture to the level
of the organization and even down to groups within the organiza-
tion, one can see clearly how culture is created, embedded, evolved,
and ultimately manipulated, and, at the same time, how culture
constrains, stabilizes, and provides structure and meaning to the
group members. These dynamic processes of culture creation and
management are the essence of leadership and make one realize
that leadership and culture are two sides of the same coin.
Leadership has been studied in far greater detail than organiza-
tional culture, leading to a frustrating diffusion of concepts and
ideas of what leadership is really all about, whether one is born or
1
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made as a leader, whether one can train people to be leaders, and
what characteristics successful leaders possess. I will not review this
literature, focusing instead on what I consider to be uniquely associ-
ated with leadership—the creation and management of culture.
As we will see, this requires an evolutionary perspective. I
believe that cultures begin with leaders who impose their own val-
ues and assumptions on a group. If that group is successful and the
assumptions come to be taken for granted, we then have a culture
that will define for later generations of members what kinds of lead-
ership are acceptable. The culture now defines leadership. But as
the group runs into adaptive difficulties, as its environment changes
to the point where some of its assumptions are no longer valid, lead-

ership comes into play once more. Leadership is now the ability to
step outside the culture that created the leader and to start evolu-
tionary change processes that are more adaptive. This ability to per-
ceive the limitations of one’s own culture and to evolve the culture
adaptively is the essence and ultimate challenge of leadership.
If leaders are to fulfill this challenge, they must first understand
the dynamics of culture, so our journey begins with a focus on defi-
nitions, case illustrations, and a suggested way of thinking about
organizational culture. In this part, I begin in Chapter One with
some brief illustrations and a definition. Chapter Two expands the
concept and argues for a multilevel conception of culture. In Chap-
ter Three, I examine in some detail two cases that illustrate well the
complexity of culture and will be used throughout the rest of the
book. And in Chapter Four, I show how culture arises in the process
of human interaction.
At this point, the most important message for leaders is this: “try
to understand culture, give it its due, and ask yourself how well you
can begin to understand the culture in which you are embedded.
In Part Two of this book we turn to the content of culture, and
in Part Three, to the dynamic processes involved in the interaction
of leadership and culture.
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3
1
THE CONCEPT OF
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE:
WHY BOTHER?
Culture is an abstraction, yet the forces that are created in social
and organizational situations that derive from culture are powerful.

If we don’t understand the operation of these forces, we become vic-
tim to them. To illustrate how the concept of culture helps to illu-
minate organizational situations, I will begin by describing several
situations I have encountered in my experience as a consultant.
Four Brief Examples
In the first case, that of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), I
was called in to help a management group improve its communica-
tion, interpersonal relationships, and decision making. After sitting
in on a number of meetings, I observed, among other things, (1)
high levels of interrupting, confrontation, and debate; (2) exces-
sive emotionality about proposed courses of action; (3) great frus-
tration over the difficulty of getting a point of view across; and (4)
a sense that every member of the group wanted to win all the time.
Over a period of several months, I made many suggestions about
better listening, less interrupting, more orderly processing of the
agenda, the potential negative effects of high emotionality and con-
flict, and the need to reduce the frustration level. The group mem-
bers said that the suggestions were helpful, and they modified certain
aspects of their procedure; for example, they scheduled more time for
some of their meetings. However, the basic pattern did not change.
No matter what kind of intervention I attempted, the basic style of
the group remained the same.
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In the second case, that of the Ciba-Geigy Company—a large
multinational chemical and pharmaceutical company located in
Basel, Switzerland—I was asked, as part of a broader consultation
project, to help create a climate for innovation in an organization
that felt a need to become more flexible in order to respond to its
increasingly dynamic business environment. The organization con-
sisted of many different business units, geographical units, and func-

tional groups. As I got to know more about these units and their
problems, I observed that some very innovative things were going
on in many places in the company. I wrote several memos that
described these innovations and presented other ideas from my own
experience. I gave the memos to my contact person in the company
with the request that he distribute them to the various geographic
and business unit managers who needed to be made aware of these
ideas.
After some months, I discovered that those managers to whom
I had personally given the memo thought it was helpful and on tar-
get, but rarely, if ever, did they pass it on, and none were ever dis-
tributed by my contact person. I also suggested meetings of managers
from different units to stimulate lateral communication, but found
no support at all for such meetings. No matter what I did, I could not
seem to get information flowing, especially laterally across divisional,
functional, or geographical boundaries. Yet everyone agreed in prin-
ciple that innovation would be stimulated by more lateral commu-
nication and encouraged me to keep on “helping.”
In the third example, Amoco, a large oil company that was
eventually merged with British Petroleum (BP), decided to cen-
tralize all of its engineering functions in a single service unit.
Whereas engineers had previously been regular parts of projects,
they were now supposed to sell their services to clients who would
be charged for these services. The engineers resisted violently and
many of them threatened to leave the organization. We were
unable to reorganize this engineering organization to fit the new
company requirements.
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