CULTURE AND DECISION MAKING IN ORGANIZATIONS

ByLorna Heaton[8]

The globe study on the interrelationships between culture and organizational leadership in societies around the world showed that valued leadership attributes are contingent on dimensions of cultural values. The results of the study provide support to the thesis that societal culture has a significant effect on organizational cultural practices.

Schein (1985, 2004) asserts that shared basic values (Schein prefers the term basic assumptions) operating at the deepest level of a group’s culture are extremely difficult to change because they tend to be taken for granted and to be non-debatable. The questioning of shared basic assumptions destabilizes an individual’s cognitive and interpersonal world causing much anxiety and defensiveness.

Lachman (1994), and indirectly also Kanungo and Jaeger (1990) and Mendonca and Kanungo (1994), have emphasized the importance for organizational effectiveness of the congruence between value assumptions underlying organizational processes and the basic values espoused by a society.

Since managers and employees will not be able to align their shared basic values with management practices developed in a different cultural context, organizations need to ensure that the value assumptions underlying management practices are congruent with the basic values in the society.

A growing body of evidence demonstrates that culture affects the process of decision making in organizations in many ways. The evidence suggests that in a specific cultural context a particular form of participative decision making is more appropriate than others, some sources of guidance are preferred in event management, and some conflict management approaches favored over others. Understanding such relationships may help to increase the influence of organizational culture on information use organizational effectiveness and employee commitment by encouraging the adoption of culturally appropriate organizational processes and practices.

The influence of culture on information use in decision making in organizations has been investigated in only a few studies, and sub-Saharan Africa is not represented in this research. In view of the limited understanding of the ways in which culture affects information use in decision making in sub-Saharan Africa and elsewhere in the developing world, there is a need for research to address this.