Like Fish in a Glass Bowl: Why Organizational Culture Matters
What personal and professional pleasure to work with the Plause leaders on organizational culture. Plause and its leaders not only talk the talk but also walk the walk on the importance of organizational culture, and how it can actively be shaped and influenced to benefit organizations and their members.
In my own work and professional experience, behavioral aspects of people’s professional lives and decision-making have always been at the center. And as a psychology professor who was trained both in Europe and in the US, I’ve always been interested in topics and technology that have the potential to truly change people’s lives — Plause and organizational culture certainly fit these bills.
In my early consulting days, I helped companies develop traditional performance appraisal systems. Pencil and paper-based, these systems were designed to systematically capture relevant aspects of people’s contributions to their company’s success — and to encourage meaningful conversations about mutual perceptions of obstacles and promoters of meaningful, successful work. It is great to see how Plause turns these feedback processes that traditionally are fairly one-sided and that take place maybe once or twice a year, into a conversation that is ongoing, casual, and effortless. And to see how interactive technology creates shared benefit by encouraging people across hierarchy levels to be in continuous touch with each other about their ideas, projects, goals, and opportunities for mutual support.
Thinking about organizational culture and sharing perceptions of organizational culture adds a crucial layer to these conversations. “It is the theory which decides what we can observe,” Einstein aptly remarked. Feedback and performance systems that focus purely on the dyad of the manager-employee relationship miss out on important systemic aspects on the organizational level. In these systems, participants may wrongly attribute their observations about organizational process and results (for example, below-expectation results, unexpected obstacles with a project) to their dyad (“we communicated poorly”), or to one participant only of this dyad (“I was demotivated and simply did not put in enough effort”). In fact these observations and events may be the result of organizational aspects that everybody in the company experiences and everybody is affected by!
Systematically considering organizational culture as a level of reflection and possible intervention and action opens new doors — to sharing complementary perceptions of a common work environment, and to acting and influencing the entire system of the organization, not just the specific part select members happen to inhabit.
I commend Plause on thinking systemically and on working on people technology that is aware of this key aspect of organizational reality. Without this awareness, we are like fish in a glass bowl that hold each other responsible for going around in circles while they neglect the glass surrounding them.
Dr. Thomas Oberlechner is a Partner at FinPsy and CEO and Chief Science Officer at BehaviorQuant.
