The Cart Before The Horse

As firms grow, the need to divide work into functional areas also grows, simply because the top leader is not able to efficiently or effectively manage everything on their own. The top leader delegates responsible agents to take charge of these functional areas, divisions, business units, departments, etc. While these delegates may be closely aligned to the top leader in assumptions, beliefs, values, and behavior, the unique and differentiated functions of their departments may generate some cultural differences. Being human also obliges them to be different (personality, expertise, age/generation, sex/gender, etc.). These operational and personal differences could produce subcultures, which are their own distinct cultures that form under or within the overarching culture of the firm. On an anecdotal note, when a person attempts to define the culture of their workplace, they often talk about the subculture they experience or their subjective opinions about the dominant culture. This is one reason why workplace culture can seem abstract―people cannot always identify it or put it into specific terms. New employees acquire the culture by observing the behaviors of others. While they are explicitly trained to do the work, they are implicitly trained in how to think and behave. Function and personality are not the only differentiators. Geographic location, and its accompanying national, regional, and ethnic customs, can create subcultures that only marginally resemble the culture at HQ. Geert Hofstede (2011) says that societal, national, and gender cultures, which children acquire when they are very young, are more deeply fixed in the human psyche than cultures acquired at school or on the job. This means that when children grow up to become leaders in the workplace, the culture with which they identify will influence the culture or subculture they create. In multinational firms, this becomes very clear in the communications and behaviors between locations. During and after the devastating COVID-19 pandemic, the use of Jetsons-style communications (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, etc.) increased significantly. People could easily connect onscreen with others anywhere, at any time. They also took crash courses in transnational etiquette because geographical cultures exposed different behavioral norms in meetings, such as: These people are informal, while those people are more formal; these people speak only when spoken to directly, while those people speak at will; and so on. Even when faced with substantial differences in subcultures, work generally still gets done. How can sense be made of disparities between the main culture and subcultures?