Organisational culture: The Market organisational culture

In the blog last week, we reviewed the Hierarchical organisational culture. This week, we shall explore the radically different customer focused style of the Market culture.

Introduction to the Market organisational culture

This culture has a high degree of controlling behaviour internally while being externally focused. The primary characteristics of this culture are the continuous evaluation of results and work completion times. They also strive to achieve measurable goals and objectives, which then become the criteria to evaluate success along with addition of factors such as market share and penetration. Then, to the external market, they define themselves through actions such as competitive pricing and market leadership while focusing relentlessly on customer service and satisfaction issues.

Then, employees are notably highly competitive and very goal oriented. They are also encouraged to be proactive in relation to projects and people, especially customers in the external market. However, there is also extremely aggressive internal competition with the emphasis placed on reputation, success, and winning. This interpersonal competition can reach such an intensely stressful level that a sense of paranoia between colleagues can arise while also risking high levels of burnout rates.

The management style is very demanding as they constantly monitor the activities of employees, especially in relation to target achievement and the quality of external relationships with clients and customers. They also focus somewhat neurotically on factors such as the image of their department, both internally and externally. This can become a further setting for interpersonal competition or even conflict, though now at the managerial level. Finally, on a more positive note, they attempt to motivate and inspire employees to think proactively and even to exceed customer expectations, though the latter objective can also increase the stress level of some employees.

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Question 1

Why might some employees react negatively to typical managerial behaviour in this culture?

Question 2

What sort of person would be attracted to this type of cultural context?

Question 3

To what extent might more creative individuals feel restricted and frustrated in this culture?

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We shall explore Question 3 in the next blog.

Reference

Cameron, K. S., & Quinn, R. E. (2011). Diagnosing and changing organizational culture: based on the competing values framework (3rd Ed.). John Wiley & Sons, Inc.