Key answer tips
Part (b)
This part of the requirement wanted students to assess the organisational cultural issues that caused the failure of the museums strategy. As with part (a), the use of an appropriate model will help generate ideas and give a structure to your response. There are a range of cultural models that can be used (Handy, Peters & Waterman, the cultural web), although the cultural web is probably the most easily assessable and familiar model for students.
Apply the model to the scenario. Don’t simply explain what the model is. Instead use examples from the case of stories, structure, symbols etc. to explain why the problems arose. Show a link between the parts of the cultural web (e.g. there are clear status symbols for some staff in the museum) and the failure of the strategy (the Director General
proposed removing these).
The main danger here is not focusing enough on culture. Some students may stray into change management but there was not enough material given in the case for 20 marks worth of material on change management. The requirement also clearly stated it wanted the focus to be on cultural issues.
The underlying cultural issues that would explain the failure of the Director General’s strategy at the National Museum can be explored using the cultural web. It can be used to understand the behaviours of an organisation – the day-to-day way in which the organisation operates – and the taken-for-granted assumptions that lie at the core of an organisation’s culture. The question suggests that it was a lack of understanding of the National Museum’s culture that lay at the heart of the Director
General’s failure.
In this suggested answer the cultural web is used as a way of exploring the failure of the Director General’s strategy from a cultural perspective. However, other appropriate models and frameworks that explore the cultural perspective will also be given credit.
A cultural web is made up of a set of factors that overlap and reinforce each other.
The symbols explore the logos, offices, titles and terminology of the organisation.
The large offices, the special dining room and the dedicated personal assistants are clear symbols of hierarchy and power in the museum. Furthermore, the language used by directors in their stories (see below) suggests a certain amount of disdain for both customers and managers. The status of professor conferred on section heads with Heritage Collections also provides relative status within the heads of collection sections themselves. The proposal of the Director General to close the heads’ dining room and to remove their dedicated personal assistants would take away two important symbols of status and is likely to be an unpopular suggestion.
The power structures of the organisation are significant. Power can be seen as the ability of certain groups to persuade or coerce others to follow a certain course of action. At present, power is vested in the heads of collection sections, reflected by their dominance on the Board of Directors. Three of the five directors represent collection sections. Similarly the Board of Trustees is dominated by people who are well-known and respected in academic fields relevant to the museum’s collections.
The power of external stakeholders (such as the government) has, until the election of the new government, been relatively weak.
They have merely handed over funding for the trustees to distribute. The Director General of the museum has been a part-time post.
The appointment of an external, full-time Director General with private sector experience threatens this power base and his suggestion for the new organisation structure takes away the dominance of the collection heads. On his proposed board, only one of six directors represents the collection sections.
The organisational structure is likely to reflect and reinforce the power structure.
This appears to be the case at the museum. However, it is interesting to note that the collections themselves are not evenly represented. Both the Director of Industrial Art and the Director of Media and Contemporary Art represent five collection sections.However, only two collection areas are represented by the Director of Art and
Architecture. This imbalance, reinforced by different symbols (professorships) and reflected in stories (see later) might suggest a certain amount of disharmony between the collection heads, which the Director General might have been able to exploit. Management at the museum are largely seen as administrators facilitating the museum’s activities. This is reinforced by the title of the director concerned;
Director of Administration.
The controls of the organisation relate to the measurements and reward systems which emphasise what is important to the organisation. At the National Museum the relative budget of each section has been heavily influenced by the Heritage Collections. These collections help determine how much the museum receives as a whole and it appears (from the budget figures) that the Board of Trustees also use this as a guide when allocating the finance internally.
Certainly, the sections with the Heritage Collections appear to receive the largest budgets. Once this division has been established the principle of allocating increases based on last year’s allocation, plus a percentage, perpetuates the division and indeed accentuates it in real financial terms. Hence, smaller sections remain small and their chance of obtaining artefacts for them to be defined a Heritage Collection becomes slimmer every year. Again, this may suggest a potential conflict between the larger and smaller collection sections of the museum.
Finally, up until the election of the new government, there appears to have been no required measures of outputs (visitor numbers, accessibility etc.). The museum was given a budget to maintain the collections, not to attract visitors. The proposal of the Director General to allocate budgets on visitor popularity disturbs the well-established way of distributing budgets in a way that reinforced the
current power base.
The routines and rituals are the way members of the organisation go about their daily work and the special events or particular activities that reinforce the ‘way we do things around here’. It is clear from the scenario that it is not thought unacceptable for directors to directly lobby the Board of Trustees and to write letters to the press and appear on television programmes to promote their views. In many organisations issues within the boardroom remain confidential and are resolved there.
However, this is clearly not now the case at the National Museum. The scenario suggests that there are certain rites of challenge (exemplified by the new Director General’s proposals) but equally there are strong rites of counter-challenge, resistance to the new ways of doing things. Often such rites are limited to grumbling or working-to- rule, but at the National Museum they extend to lobbying powerful external forces in the hope that these forces can be combined to resist the suggested changes.
Stories are used by members of the organisation to tell people what is important in the organisation.
The quotes included in the scenario are illuminating both in content and language.
The Director of Art and Architecture believes that Heritage Collections have a value that transcends popularity with the ‘undiscerning public’. He also alludes to the relative importance of collections.
He suggests that fashion may not be a suitable subject for a collection, unlike art and architecture. Similarly, the anonymous quote about lack of consultation, that includes a reference to the new Director General as ‘an ex-grocer’, attempts to belittle both management and commerce.
In the centre of the cultural web is the paradigm of the National Museum. This is the set of assumptions that are largely held in common and are taken for granted in the organisation. These might be:
• The museum exists for the good of the nation
• It is a guardian of the continuity of the nation’s heritage and culture
• What constitutes heritage and culture is determined by experts
• The government funds the purchase and maintenance of artefacts that represent this heritage and culture.
There are two important elements of the Director General’s proposals that are missing from this paradigm; visitors and customers. Changing the current paradigm may take considerable time and effort.
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