Corporate Culture as an Impediment to Employee Involvement

Abstract

Organizational culture can effectively undermine the change strategy of a management that believes it is committed to employee involvement. Based on experience in assisting a manufacturing organization to implement change at four facilities, the authors found that corporate culture may be the most difficult barrier to overcome in implementing an employee involvement program, and that management action is critical in shaping and maintaining that culture. It is concluded that in order to eliminate resistance to basic changes, underlying organizational values must first be identified and recognized by the most powerful purveyor of corporate culture—the CEO.