Collaborative Research: An Experimental Approach to Organizational Culture

组织文化是研究者和管理者都熟悉的概念。它经常被认为是公司效率的来源，或者是公司调整或合并中出现问题的原因。然而，尽管人们对它很熟悉，但很难准确地了解什么是组织文化，以及它是如何影响公司的。我们提出了一系列研究，使用实验程序来创造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的共同历史和理解而产生的东西，它依赖于组织的历史，因此在公司之间可以有很大的差异，它允许公司成员协调活动，从而更有效地执行。我们的实验使用的任务是允许由两个或更多的受试者组成的“公司”通过重复互动来发展文化。在实验中，语言是文化的隐喻--受试者需要发展一种方法来使用简单、简短的短语来指代未知和复杂的物体，以便快速完成任务。受试者发展的这些“文化”最终是建立在团队共同的历史基础上的(他们最初关注的是物体的哪些方面？)，它们最终是独特的，在不同组之间差异很大(例如：一个组开始将一个物体称为“Macarena”，而另一组将同一物体称为“咖啡杯”)，他们最终允许小组协调和提高效率(一个词的描述允许小组共同快速识别对象)。我们的初步实验调查了两组独立发展文化--并在执行任务方面变得高效--合并后会发生什么。不出所料，文化差异会导致合并团队完成任务的效率降低。此外，受试者没有意识到整合这些简单的文化会有多难，导致他们高估了合并后的公司。最后，一旦出现文化冲突，受试者会将失败的根源归咎于其他受试者的无能，而不是整合不同文化的困难。未来的实验将通过更仔细地研究受试者将合并失败归咎于他人而不是文化不相容的程度，来进一步探索最后一种现象。一个隐含的含义是，管理者可能会过于频繁地解雇员工，将业绩低下归咎于他们的无能，而不是文化融合的必要性。我们还将探索文化融合与组织成员是否有共同或相反的激励措施之间的关系。

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.