Collaborative Research: An Experimental Approach to Organizational Culture

组织文化对于研究者和管理者来说都是一个熟悉的概念。它经常被认为是企业效率的来源，或者是企业适应或合并问题的原因。然而，尽管它很熟悉，但很难准确地捕捉组织文化是什么以及它如何影响公司。我们提出了一系列的研究，使用实验程序来创造一些非常类似于实验室培养的东西。基于研究文献中的共同线索，文化的基本要素是，它是通过组织成员之间共享的历史和理解而产生的东西，它取决于组织的历史，因此在不同的公司之间可能有很大差异，它允许公司成员协调活动，从而更有效地执行。我们的实验使用了一个任务，允许由两个或多个主体组成的“公司”通过反复互动来发展文化。在我们的实验中，语言充当了文化的隐喻——被试需要找到一种方法，用简单、简短的短语来指代未知和复杂的物体，以便快速完成任务。这些被试发展的“文化”最终是基于小组在执行任务时的共同历史（他们最初关注的是物体的哪些方面？），它们最终是特殊的，在小组之间差异很大(例如：其中一组将一个物体称为“Macarena”，而另一组将同一物体称为“咖啡杯”)，它们最终使小组能够协调并提高效率（一个词的描述使小组能够快速地共同识别物体）。我们最初的实验调查了当两个独立发展文化的群体——并且在完成任务时变得高效——合并时会发生什么。毫不奇怪，文化差异会导致合并后的团队执行任务的效率下降。此外，并购对象没有意识到整合这些简单的文化有多么困难，这导致他们高估了合并后的公司。最后，一旦文化冲突出现，受试者就会把失败的原因归咎于其他受试者的无能，而不是难以融合不同的文化。未来的实验将进一步探索最后一种现象，通过更仔细地检查受试者将合并失败归咎于他人而不是文化不相容的程度。其中一个暗示是，管理者可能会过于频繁地解雇员工，将低绩效归咎于他们的能力不足，而不是文化融合的需要。我们还将探讨文化整合与组织成员是否有共同或反对的激励之间的关系。

Organizational culture is a familiar concept to both researchers andmanagers. It is frequently cited as the source of a firm's efficiency or asthe cause of problems in firm adaptation or mergers. However, in spite ofits familiarity, it has been difficult to capture exactly whatorganizational culture is and how it affects firms. We propose a series ofstudies that use an experimental procedure to create something very similarto culture in the laboratory. The basic elements of culture, based oncommon threads in the research literature, are that it is something thatarises through shared history and understanding between members of anorganization, that it depends on the organization's history and cantherefore vary greatly between firms, and that it allows members of a firmto coordinate activity and therefore perform more efficiently.Our experiments use a task that allows "firms" consisting of two or moresubjects to develop culture through repeated interaction. In ourexperiments, language serves as a metaphor for culture - subjects need todevelop a way to refer to unknown and complex objects using simple, shortphrases in order to perform a task quickly. These "cultures" that subjectsdevelop end up being based on the group's shared history in performing thetask (what aspects of the objects did they focus on initially?), they end upbeing idiosyncratic and varying greatly between groups (as an example: onegroup came to refer to an object as "Macarena" while another group referredto the same object as "coffee cups"), and they end up allowing the groups tocoordinate and improve efficiency (the one word descriptions allowed groupsto jointly identify objects quickly).Our initial experiments investigate what happens when two groups that havedeveloped culture independently - and have become efficient at performingthe task - are merged. Not surprisingly, differences in cultures lead todecreases in the efficiency with which the merged group performs the task.In addition, subjects are not aware of how difficult it will be to integrateeven these simple cultures, leading them to overvalue the merged firm.Finally, once culture conflict arises, subjects blame the source of thefailures on incompetence on the part of other subjects rather than on thedifficulty in integrating different cultures. Future experiments willfurther explore the last phenomenon by more closely examining the extent towhich subjects place the blame for merger failure on others rather than onculture incompatibility. One implication is that managers may fireemployees too frequently, blaming low performance on their incompetencerather than on the need for cultural integration. We will also explore howcultural integration is related to whether members of an organization havecommon or opposed incentives.