Organizational culture is formed by diverse perspectives
Many Korean organizations have become interested in educating their employees on diversity and inclusion (D&I). This positive development will help minority groups contribute more to organizations, resulting in more balanced organizational cultures. However, some organizations are making only surface-level changes without truly understanding how D&I can best help their organizational cultures.
In order to actually make organizational culture more diverse and inclusive, it is not enough to merely address what is visible — age, race, ethnicity, language, race, sex — because organizational culture is deep-rooted and invisible. Attitudes, values and beliefs should also be observed and possibly corrected.
Without addressing these deeper phenomena, any D&I initiative will only have short-term effects. Helping different groups in an organization understand each other is the key to creating a desirable D&I culture because it helps each group understand other groups’ unique values, beliefs and underlying assumptions. Although demographic diversity issues are equally important to address, one under-examined source of difficulty is a lack of mutual understanding within the hierarchy —specifically, between executives, managers, and employees. This may not be what we traditionally think of when we think about “diversity,” but communication between these groups is key to ensuring that organizations enjoy access to diverse perspectives.
Indeed, one of the primary findings from my diagnoses of the organizational culture of around 300 Korean companies is that executives, managers and employees have considerably different subcultures. According to Edgar Schein, this is natural because these are effectively subgroups that perform different functions. However, this means that once these subcultures have developed, it is not easy to change them.
Furthermore, each group not only has a distinct subculture but also a completely different perspective on the other groups. In several recent D&I workshops, I diagnosed and discovered very different group phenomena and noticed that perceptions of and satisfaction levels with D&I issues in their organizations differed wildly from group to group. How employees see managers and executives influences their opinions about what type of culture the organization has. If employees form a certain evaluation collectively about their managers and executives, the attitudes and behaviors driven by this evaluation will become permanent. Their understanding shapes their social identity, which will make them act in a certain way, and can also lead to deeply held biases about other groups.
What is even more difficult is that organizations are typically not very interested in resolving these prejudices and biases that groups hold about each other. Whenever a diagnosis is conducted, almost all organizations will have the same results: executives will have the highest satisfaction scores, team managers will have medium satisfaction scores, and non-managing employees will have the lowest ones. The scores themselves are important, but what’s more important is the wide gap between these groups.
This difference is so large that we cannot ignore it. Their satisfaction levels with each other are low, which leads people to not work effectively because they assume that what they can expect from everybody else is limited. They tend to have low expectations for each other, and will not try to do anything in a new way because they assume that other groups have their own way of working, which cannot be easily changed. By repeating these same practices, they tend to build their own permanent subcultures.
When I asked workshop participants why perceptions and satisfaction levels differed so much from group to group, they gave me a variety of reasons, such as asymmetry of information and authority, a generational gap, a salary and welfare gap, a top-down culture, an absence of communication, an increased workload, workspace and opportunity differences and many others. These phenomena are so common in organizations that they are frequently thought to not be problems. However, ignoring these problems is a devaluation of diverse perspectives: If a group is complaining about a particular issue and that issue is not taken seriously, it will not be possible to foster an effective working relationship between that group and other groups.
When asked about what they can do to help other groups voice their different opinions, participants gave many suggestions: having one-on-one meetings, asking team members to lead a meeting, not criticizing employees’ opinions, installing a suggestions box, having a regular interview session, talking softly, soliciting opinions from a shy employee, listening first, diversifying dialogue channels, and not asking somebody who has voiced an opinion to also suggest solutions. These answers may seem overly simplistic, but managers agree that even these small steps will help employees voice different opinions.
According to Chris Argyris, the late Yale professor, individuals and organizations learn how to avoid pain and threats by developing defensive routines. This instinct creates practices or conventions that can be difficult to move beyond. Only diverse perspectives will allow us to break out of these cycles. Given this, it is in organizations’ best interest to increase their D&I awareness levels. One way this can be achieved is by allowing people to have more opportunities to talk to different groups in their daily lives, which will help them see different perspectives. Diverse perspectives are all around us.
Kim Jong-nam is the founding CEO of Culture Engine (www.cultureengine.co.kr), which specializes in organizational culture change via consulting, training and coaching.