INCUBATOR - Person Culture
The Person Culture (Incubator) is personal and egalitarian. Indeed it has almost no structure at all and what structure it does provide is merely for personal convenience. The purpose of the organization is to free individuals from routine to more creative activities and to minimize time spent on self-maintenance.
GUIDED MISSILE - Task Culture
The Task Culture (Guided Missile) is egalitarian, impersonal and task-oriented. The focus is on tasks, typically undertaken by teams or project groups. Employees must do 'whatever it takes' to complete a task, and what is needed is often unclear and may have to be discovered. Everyone is at least potentially equal, since one’s relative contributions are not yet known.
EIFFEL TOWER - Role Culture
The Role Culture (Eiffel Tower) is hierarchical and task-oriented. There is a bureaucratic division of labor with various roles and functions that is prescribed in advance. These are coordinated at the top by a hierarchy. You obey the boss because it is his or her role to instruct you. If each role is acted out as envisaged by the system then tasks will be completed as planned.
FAMILY - Power Culture
The Power Culture (Family) is personal with close face-to-face relationships but also hierarchical, in the sense that the 'father' of a family has experience and authority greatly exceeding those of his 'children'. This type of power is essentially intimate and benign. The work of the corporation in this type of culture is usually carried forward in an atmosphere that in many respects mimics the home.
What makes our approach on corporate culture unique
The majority of organizations have a single dominant corporate culture that struggles with less dominant orientations, that can come either from national or from functional sub-cultures. There is NO "BEST" (SINGLE) corporate culture as there is is no significant correlation with any one single corporate culture and business performance, growth, sustainability or other similar output variables. On the contrary, our research found out that the highly performing cultures are the ones who can include in their DNA all the four types, by maximizing the value of the positive sides of each ones through reconciliation of competing demands like short and long term, push and pull etc…
“The most effective corporate culture is the one that has the the push towards change of the Incubator, the commitment of the Family, the structure of the Tour Eiffel and the achievement drive of the Guided Missile”
How to get there?
In every organization there are tensions.
Diagnosing and dealing with these TENSIONS is, therefore, critical in cases of:
Mergers, acquisitions and alliances
Increasing globalization - internationalization
Creating a high performance organization
Moving to a values-driven organization
Change management
