Cultural change and competitive performance

Against a background of management literature which advocated cultural change to increase corporate competitive performance (such as Peters and Waterman's In Search of Excellence), John Hendry and Veronica Hope explore four components of the problem of bringing about cultural change to produce major strategic shifts — a problem which has proved difficult to solve in the last decade. For example, a web of organisational properties and practices acts to protect the existing culture (the ‘cultural web’).The authors highlight two very different but related ways in which cultural change programmes try to work - by reference to control and by reference to sets of specific values. Today's companies are losing control (informed structures, greater individualism). To restore control, they would be advised to value and empower their staff more highly, i.e. work on values to reinstate a sense of community, and control by consensus. But will all the stakeholders agree?