This chapter resonated with me easily because of my involvement with a commercial real estate brokerage firm for 2 years, prior to coming back to SJSU. All of these pieces described in the chapter applied easily to my experience.
I was interested in the section "Can a manager be an agent of cultural change?" because I've always been interested in what makes a good manager vs. a poor one, in respect to the employee's perspective. "Managers may articulate a new vision in a fresh vocabulary, but it is the workers who smile, sigh, snicker, or scoff." This happens because "shared interpretations as naturally emerging from all members of a group rather than consciously engineered by leaders." It seems that based on this chapter, a manager has little to do with the culture of an office, and no matter what an manager's efforts are, the employees will generate their own cultural reality.
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I can attest to that. I work in a place where I have seen many managers go through and try their best or just fail completely because it wasn't what they expected. I admit I have a hard time taking a manager's role seriously when it comes to troubleshooting certain situations. I rarely ever need the assistance of a manager because I am pretty much prepared and experienced enough to handle almost every situation. There are some managers that I do like and they are the ones who care more about the workers than they do anything else. With those, you can see that they are honest, and hardworking.
There is quite a debate in the management and organizational communication literature over how much managers can control an organization's culture. Managers, especially those at the very top, do have greater power and likely can exert some influence on an organization's culture. But as you point out, all organization members participate in the creation and maintenance of an organization's culture. So there is the potential for those at the lower levels of the hierarchy to create their own cultural reality, as you call it.
I know from personal experience that a manager can greatly affect one if they allow themselves to get close, and have a good respectful interaction in the work place. My manager and I are now close friends, and roommates, we get along well because we both have the same ideologies when it comes to working hard regardless of situation.
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