Organizational Culture and Its Counterculture - 2113 Words

1. The authors Joanne Martin and Caren Siehl are focusing on organizational culture and its counterculture. The definition given by the authors for counterculture states that counterculture will most likely arise in a strongly centralized organization that has allowed a reasonable decentralization of authority to take place. The article assumes that cultural systems can emphasize as well as sustain the objectives of the firm’s top management. The main argument here is that in addition to serving integrative functions, culture can express disagreement and address needs for segregation among organizational elements. As a replacement for thinking culture is a huge phenomenon, they explore counterculture’s uneasy symbiotic relationship with†¦show more content†¦All the dà ©cor was standardized. In GM if an employee was invisible he was a â€Å"team player†. They engage in public, symbolic acts of conformity to show they are team players. The third core valu e to the GM way of life was loyalty to one’s boss. They were all expected to be loyal to their bosses and not question them or even point out their wrong doings. One of the examples given was, GM retirement dinner, in this retirement dinner they pay tribute to the retiree by telling his journey story in the past years in GM. These dinner instilled mutual respect, admiration and loyalty. It was important for GM to tell the stories of their retiring employees, simply because these stories were true and shows a sequence of events in the company’s history. In one case, DeLorean did not go to pick his boss up from the airport, which was a ritual followed by all GM employees, what happened was DeLorean’s boss was furious and expected DeLorean to not repeat it ever again. In the retirement dinner, they reward the retiree for the past tasks done by ensuring future loyalty, so in DeLorean’s case he would be marked by the others and may be seen as someone who isnâ €™t a team player. The counterculture to these dominant cultures can be seen by DeLorean’s actions. There are three areas to it; the first is questioning deference to authority. DeLorean kept creating stories that were being questioned by other employees, because one storyShow MoreRelatedThe Existence of Different Types of Cultures1092 Words   |  5 Pages　　Every society has a culture, in fact, every human being is cultured. In our daily usage of the word culture, we often just refer it as a custom or tradition of certain group of people, or else the higher desirable quality we can acquire after paying a hard effort such as playing piano. 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