Implications of corporate culture: a manager's guide to action

Drawing on cultural anthropology, Sathe develops a way of thinking about corporate culture that makes the concept analytically useful for dealing with managerial problems. He shows that by distinguishing between culture and behavior, and examining both simultaneously, it is possible to see more clearly why culture can be both an asset and a liability, and why it has such a subtle but powerful influence on organizational life. Not all cultures are equally powerful, however; Sathe presents some approaches for diagnosing a culture and understanding its strengths along with some implications for managerial action. Noting that a "perfect" culture-person fit is difficult to engineer, he makes suggestions for avoiding such mismatches and for better managing the culture shocks that inevitably hit the newcomer to an organization. He then turns to the question of how culture/person misfits may be understood and managed and what it takes to successfully deviate from the organization's culture when one is required to do so.