The
research by Lawrence and Nohria (2002) and Nohria et al. (2008) made
significant inroads to developing a comprehensive motivation theory. To fulfill
all the four emotional drives to acquire, bond, comprehend and defend, Nohria
et al. (2008) suggest that each drive is best met by a distinctive
organizational lever – the reward system, culture, job design, and performance
management and resource allocation processes, respectively.
However, the
investigators perform conventional quantitative analysis on data derived from a
survey of a financial service giant, a leading IT services firm and 300 Fortune
500 companies. The survey was developed from prior empirical researches that
were based on the various employee motivation theories. Lawrence and Nohria
(2002) reference empirical work from almost all the motivation theories, incorporating
the representative variables for employee motivation and the organizational
lever for motivation, with all the potential relevant causal conditions in
their survey. The effect of each variable is assumed to have an independent
capacity to influence level, intensity or probability of organizational performance
in a linear and additive way. In this symmetric design, correlation and other
measures of association were used to estimate the net effects assuming that the
impact of a given independent variable is the same not only across other
independent variables but also across other independent variables and also
across all their different combinations. To estimate the net effect of a given independent
variable, the researchers offset the impact of competing causal conditions by
subtracting from the estimate the effect of each variable of any explained
variation in the dependent variable it shares with other causal variables.
An initial step to
overcoming the deterministic nature of the Lawrence and Nohria (2002) and
Nohria et al. (2008) comprehensive “human drives” theory on employee motivation,
organizational levers and organizational performance is to understand the
“level of influence” of the organizational levers. Reward systems, job design,
and performance-management and resource allocations processes are
microscopically focused levers that organizations can use to fulfill each
respective drive, as long as they are specified correctly. That is, the reward
system, job design and performance-management and resource allocation processes
must be independently and specifically aligned with each drive. When there is
no alignment, these levers do not lead to the fulfillment of their respective
drives. This raises the following questions in our minds: Are the relationships
between these organizational levers and employees’ drives truly binary and
linear as prior research suggests? Even if a lever is aligned with a human
drive, how can the failure of a lever be explained? In reality, we argue that
there are circumstances that cannot be completely influenced and covered by a reward
system, job design, and/or performance-management and resource allocation
processes especially in the long term because they are microscopically focused
on specific elements of “human drives”.
Similarly, fostering
collaboration, teamwork, mutual reliance and friendship among employees through
culture fulfills employees’ desire to bond. Yet the same argument above about
influence and coverage applies, and while a team culture may fulfill a desire
to bond, so could a culture of innovation where everyone is drawn together by a
discovery, or a culture of bureaucracy where rules, policies and a stable environment
could encourage mutual reliance and friendship. The difference between reward
system, job design, performance-management and resource allocations process and
culture is that culture is throughout an organization. Very often, an
organization has built its brand and reputation on a type of culture. For
example, Google is built on an innovation culture while Walmart is built on a
culture that competes aggressively for market share in consumer spending.
To understand how
various cultures may be used as an organizational lever that facilitates
employee motivation, there is a need to identify the prevailing types of
organizational cultures. Using a list of effectiveness criteria that was claimed
by Campbell (1977) as comprehensive in scope, Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983)
discovered that values, assumptions and interpretations cluster together via
multi-dimensional scaling. The framework specifies culture in terms of two sets
of competing values: (1) the dilemma over flexible and control values, and (2)
the dilemma over people (internal) and organizational (external) focus. Four
types of cultures transpire from these two sets of competing values: flexible
cultures that emphasize an internal or external focus, and control cultures that
emphasize an internal or external focus. Flexibility encourages employee
empowerment and creativity, and control aid implementation of the new ideas
(Khazanchi, Lewis, & Boyer, 2007). The clan culture (hereafter team
culture) places a great deal of emphasis on human affiliation in a flexible structure,
internal focus on cohesion and morale, and human resource development to create
team spirit (Cameron, Quinn, DeGraff, & Thakor, 2006). The adhocracy
culture (hereafter innovation culture) places a great deal of emphasis on
change through a flexible structure, external focus that requires a readiness
to grow through risk-taking, innovation, planning and adaptability, resource
acquisition and cutting-edge output (Denison & Spreitzer, 1991). The
hierarchy culture (hereafter bureaucratic culture) places a great deal of
emphasis on structure characterized by bureaucratic mechanisms that provide clear
roles and procedures that are formally defined by rules and regulations. It is
internally oriented, and stresses the role of information management,
communication and routines to support an orderly work environment with
sufficient coordination and distribution of information to provide employees with
a psychological sense of continuity and security through conformity,
predictability and stability (Quinn & Kimberly, 1984). Finally, the market
culture (hereafter competitive culture) places a great deal of emphasis on
control mechanisms in an externally focus structure. This culture values competition,
competence, and achievement (Hartnell, Ou, & Kinicki, 2011). Clear
objectives, goal setting, productivity and efficiency are rewarded (Cameron
& Quinn, 1999). The competing values framework (CVF) is a culture taxonomy
widely used in research (Cameron et al., 2006; Ostroff, Kinicki, & Tamkins,
2003).
Each type of culture is
viewed as an organizational lever to fulfill the drives that motivate
employees, thereby overcoming the binary and linear limitations as well as the incomplete
coverage of specifying narrow levers using a reward system, job design, and
performance-management and resource-allocation processes. For example,
introducing some characteristics of an innovation culture may be sufficient to
provide meaning to fulfill the drive to comprehend whereas, adopting some
characteristics of a bureaucratic culture may provide the appropriate level of
fairness and transparency to fulfill the drive to defend. Consequently, culture
has a deeper level of influence because of the various types. This macroscopic
property gives the many types of culture the potential to be organizational
levers that subsumes the narrow levers to motivate employees over the long
term.
Given
the variety of cultures, we therefore pose the research question: What
cultural levers best motivate employees to create organizational value? Prior
research on organizational culture and value suggest that a configurationally
approach may be necessary to better understand the patterns between the antecedent
conditions and outcomes within a type of culture rather the net effects of a
specified culture on value (Hartnell et al., 2011). Therefore, we advocate that
researchers use a set-theoretic approach to provide “causal recipes” of
cultural conditions sufficient for motivating employees to create organizational
value. Set-theoretic analysis focuses on uniformities and near uniformities of
a set of conditions (variables), rather than on general patterns of
association. Our understanding of employee motivation, organizational levers of
motivation and organizational performance may be advanced by adopting this
alternative approach over conventional quantitative analysis.
- Cameron, K. S., Quinn, R. E., DeGraff, J., & Thakor, A. V. (2006). Competing values leadership: Creating values in organizations. Edward Elgar Publishing.
- Campbell, J. P. (1977). On the nature of organizational effectiveness. In P. S. Goodman, & J. M. Pennings (Eds.), New perspectives on organizational effectiveness. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
- Denison, D. R., & Spreitzer, G. M. (1991). Organizational culture and organizational development: A competing values approach. Research in Organizational Change and Development, 5(1), 1–21.
- Hartnell, C. A., Ou, A. Y., & Kinicki, A. (2011). Organizational culture and organizational effectiveness: A meta-analytic investigation of the competing values framework’s theoretical suppositions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(4), 677–694.
- Khazanchi, S., Lewis, M. W., & Boyer, K. K. (2007). Innovation-supportive culture: The impact of organizational values on process innovation. Journal of Operations Management, 25(4), 871–884.
- Lawrence, P. R., & Nohria, N. (2002). Driven: How human nature shapes our choices. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
- Nohria, N., Groysberg, B., & Lee, L. (2008). Employee motivation: A powerful new model. Harvard Business Review, 86(7/8), 78–83.
- Ostroff, C., Kinicki, A. J., & Tamkins, M. M. (2003). Organizational culture and climate. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
- Quinn, R. E., & Rohrbaugh, J. (1983). A spatial model of effectiveness criteria: Towards a competing values approach to organizational analysis. Management Science, 29(3), 363–377.
- Quinn, R. E., & Kimberly, J. R. (1984). Managing organizational transitions. Homewood, IL: Dow Jones-Irwin.