Cultural Confluence in Organizational Change

The Country Director Silva dives into his management books and reads them with new eyes, while doing some serious soul searching to raise the cultural awareness of himself and his management team. Ghemawat developed the CAGE framework, describing four areas of distance and subsequent risk for multinational companies, and Silva understands his subsidiary has hit the C of Cultural distance. Deeper layers of culture are situated within the unconscious minds, creating a blind spot for many managers and Silva recognizes this to be true for his predominantly Portuguese management team. Another model is the EPG model of Perlmutter, the global strategic profiles of multinationals: ethnocentric, polycentric, and geocentric profiles. Silva notices that his ‘best’ management practices emanate from HQ, are not as culture neutral as he thought and that his present structures are not capable to create sufficient internal information flow. He realizes he needs to become more geocentric. He then formulates the ultimate goal: to research culture much further and develop a culture-specific intervention. The objective is to embark on a transformative change process that will be vested in simple, genuine, and logical local concepts.

The second chapter of Part I recounts the context in which this story is told. Africa below the Sahara  faces the daunting challenge to create wealth for its peoples and to deal with its disruptive history: slave trade, followed by a relatively short period of true colonialization, independence, and the remaining strive for decolonialization. Africa may be characterized by an emerged reality of ‘having a double version of everything’: traditional and modern. While by no means static, nor mutually exclusive nor free from power inequalities, we can detect the search for ‘traditional’ indigenous forms of leadership, management, and organization and the efforts to reconcile a mosaic of cultural logic and institutions. Some talk about the search for hybrid forms, others call it confluence and in this story about the Portuguese subsidiary in Angola, the questions will be posed what are the rather static, essentialized aspects of culture and which flexible, performative aspects of culture can in the end be distinguished (both from Angolan and Portuguese sides)?

The difference between etic and etic research is shortly explained, and the chapter sets off with a discussion on the (dis)advantages of etic research. Used in a positive way and with care, it gives us a chance to compare cultures and, in this case, is executed through the cultural dimensions of Hofstede. The different basic values of Angola, Portugal, and the USA (where most management literature originates) are compared, and they explain the situation leading up to the strike as well as provide clues as to how to proceed into the organizational change process. Fully understanding the main cultural differences between Portuguese management and Angolan frontliners concerning power distance, collectivism, and uncertainty avoidance (giving form to the so-called pyramid culture) provide a lot of understanding of the strike and the behaviour of the employees. Furthermore, these differences topped up with the cultural similarities between Angola and Portugal, in terms of a tender culture, striving for dialogue and consensus, and short-term orientation, with high respect for traditional wisdom, form interesting points of departure for the change process.

Part III describes the organizational change that was adopted. Using the elements of the research, the company was able to combine the best of both worlds and created a new Council, as an innovative organ within the company structure, enabling the involvement of frontline workers and bridging the gap with management. This chapter provides the design: the set-up; the expectations of management; the selection of members; the first meeting and naming the council; the organization and formulation of mission and values; and finally the activities that were planned. The Council was officially called the Culture Council while informally the name Soba Council remained in vogue.

In this chapter, named ‘Reaping the harvest,’ the extensive results of a transformative organizational change process are reported. The one-and-half year of implementation of the Culture/Soba Council within a Portuguese subsidiary in Angola had created company trust and a community at company level. Decision making improved considerably, taking information from the bottom up and vice versa. Workers had found a space to express their needs; time was spent together, and relationships were built. Engagement and motivation went up visibly, and absenteeism and personnel turnover plummeted. Management observed innovative minds expressing themselves and emerging leadership skills they had not seen before. The yearly Company party improved enormously and the handing out of several awards gave the frontliners a chance to express their appreciation for certain colleagues as well as the possible lack of it for management. The evaluation of the Culture Council was very positive, except for a small minority who felt that the Council had a tendency for snitching.

Part IV is the conclusion and embodies one chapter, with a wrap-up and taking some lessons into the future. One of the conclusions is that diversity, many-faceted identities and structures, duplication of institutions, already existing as well as emerging complementarity between the modern and the traditional aspects: they all seem to be part of African reality today. Furthermore, the Culture/Soba Council is significantly different from a Works Council because of the nature of the dialogue, being harmonious and avoiding discussion or confrontation; because of the cultural exchange; the relationship building; and the striving for the common good along community guidelines. While rather essentialist values concerning collectivism and power distance remained in tact, the Angolan performative aspects were observed in the flexibility in hierarchical thinking: accepting this company space as a place to speak up; enacting a leadership (even Soba) role while being young, possibly female; and handing it on to others after one year. The main performative aspect for Portuguese leadership was embracing more complexity and building genuine relationships at all levels. The chapter ends with some consequences for HR departments and with some final remarks from Silva.