A culture helps to define the nature of reality for those people who are part of that culture. People belong to multiple groups and cultures, which provide the lenses through which members interpret and assign value to the various events and products of this world. Culture is composed of artifacts and products (visible and conscious manifestations), norms and values (group’s collective answers to universal challenges) and basic assumptions (invisible and unconscious beliefs about universal challenges). If we are to understand and influence men and women in their daily work inside contemporary organizations, then we must come to understand and fully appreciate their implicitly held models of reality.
Ultimately, culture provides guidelines for problem-solving, decision making, influencing, establishing mindsets and directing behaviors. More generally, culture serves an overarching purpose. Culture is the collective programming of the mind that distinguishes members of one group or category of people from another. The cultures of organizations must thus be understood within the context of each organization’s purposes. The ceremonies, symbols, assumptions, and modes of leadership in an organization are usually directed toward the organization’s purposes and derive from its cultural base. Precisely because of its subordinate (though critical) role, culture is a phenomenon so elusive that, unless it is explicitly targeted, it can often be seen only when an organization is struggling with a particularly complicated or intractable problem—as often is the case with contemporary organizations. It can be seen when existing and accepted sources of expertise are failing to provide guidance or even a valid and useful portrayal of reality. Culture is revealed at a moment when the organization must contain its anxiety.
Culture and Leadership—The Containment of Anxiety
Beyond the understanding of the cultures themselves and how they are formulated, it is important for organizational coaches to consider how cultures ultimately serve the purpose of containing the anxiety and fear that is faced by organizational leaders. Anxiety is created in relation to the work of the leader and the formal and informal processes of evaluation and monitoring that are associated with this work. Anxiety is also created at a second level, as the assumptions of one culture collide with those of other cultures. A group creates assumptions and thus develops a culture as it learns to adapt to external circumstances and establish internal integration. The group feels better because the culture provides a solution – a way of perceiving, thinking, and feeling about the challenges it faces.
Organizational cultures do not change easily (as those aligned with the tangible culture tend to emphasize). This is for a variety of reasons. Not the least of these reasons is the ability of culture to assuage the anxieties and fears that develop as we adapt to external influences and seek internal integration. If the assumptions and beliefs upon which our culture is based are challenged through either external or internal situations, or through an organizational change process, we will tend to resist the challenges. We seek cognitive and emotional stability. We avoid fear and anxiety of instability because these feelings provoke pain—and we avoid pain. So, we avoid change. Edgar Schein (1992, p.23) specifically suggests that anxiety is released when basic assumptions are unstable. The human mind needs cognitive stability. Therefore, any challenge to or questioning of a basic assumption will release anxiety and defensiveness. In this sense, the shared basic assumptions and beliefs that make up the culture of a group can be thought of as psychological defense mechanisms that permit the group to continue to remain viable.
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