Maximizing Organizational Effectiveness by Creating a Culture of Alignment

Abstract

Oftentimes an organizational transformation fails not because of external reasons but internal resistance. A step often neglected by senior management in organization transformation is aligning the transformation process with the corporate culture. When a transformation works against established corporate culture, it will be rejected by the organization and will eventually fail despite the best efforts by senior management. However, if an organization transformation is closely aligned with the corporate culture, its chance of success is greatly enhanced. In this paper, we propose a step-by-step procedure to align an organization transformation process with the four layers of corporate culture. This can be pictorially illustrated by the Corporate Cultural Onion Model and the Simple Lever Model of Organizational Alignment.