Deal Kennedy culture type

Deal and Kennedy’s (1982) model, based on two dimensions, suggested that the biggest single influence on a company’s culture was the business environment in which it operated. They called this ‘corporate culture’, which they asserted embodied what was required to succeed in that environment. The two key dimensions were the degree of risk associated with the company’s activities, and the speed at which companies – and their employees – get feedback on whether decisions or strategies are successful. By ‘feedback’

Deal and Kennedy do not mean just bonuses, promotions and pats on the back. They use the term much more broadly to refer to knowledge of results. In this sense, a goalkeeper gets instant feedback from making a great save, but a surgeon may not know for several days whether an operation is successful, and it may take months or even years to discover whether a decision about a new product is correct. Deal and Kennedy distinguish between quick and slow feedback. Also, by splitting each dimension into high and low they came up with four generic cultures, as illustrated in the Figure 3.

Figure 3 Deal and Kennedy culture types chart (1982)

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1. Tough guy macho culture

The first Deal and Kennedy (1982) culture type, tough-guy macho culture, is commonly thought to be prevalent in organizations in which feedback comes in the form of financial rewards. You can think here of commodity brokers and sales-orientated organizations, such as those that sell water purifiers or financial services. Feedback, however, can come in many other ways. Police officers, sports people and entertainers all receive rapid feedback on the effectiveness of their work, and they could all be classified as belonging to a ‘tough guy’ culture, even though their feedback is not simply financial.

Similarly, all these occupations have a degree of inherent risk, and the line between success and failure can be very fine indeed. For example, a football manager’s career could rest on one refereeing decision, and a comedian’s success depends on the mixture of people in the audience. Managers in this type of culture need to be able to make decisions quickly and to accept risk. To survive when things go wrong, they need to be resilient. These cultures are characterized by aggressive internal competition. Employees in such organizations believe that to get on they must be as tough as the ‘movers and shakers’ at the top. These activities tend to produce a lot of internal politics and conflict. In addition, these cultures tend to nurture short-term views, and here you might recall some of the reasons that are believed to have led to the fall of organizations such as Enron and Lehman Brothers Bank. Despite the label ‘tough guy’, Deal and Kennedy suggest that this culture is the least discriminatory of the four. From their perspective, this culture type is generally a meritocracy in which success is what is acknowledged and rewarded.

2. Work hard play hard

The second type of culture, work hard play hard culture, is generally characterized by high levels of activity, and each employee has to take few risks. Instead, success is measured by persistence. Typically, the primary cultural value is to supply customers with a quality product or service. These cultures spawn meetings, conventions, teamwork, office parties, jargon, and buzzwords and so on. They are typical of large organizations such as the motor industry, IT and telecoms because in smaller organizations there are often increased levels of risk as ‘every decision is a big one’. The high levels of energy create two main problems for a manager: ensuring that the energy is being directed at the right tasks, and ensuring that quality accompanies the high levels of activity. For these reasons, IBM put up ‘Think’ signs all around the company.

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3. Bet your company culture

The third type of Deal and Kennedy culture, bet your company culture, is normally found in organizations involved in projects that consume large amounts of resources and take a long time to be realized. Examples include an aerospace organization deciding to develop a new aircraft, such as Airbus, which has spent many years developing its new A380. Other examples would include a construction company building a skyscraper or an oil company that starts drilling in a new region. Each of these projects is very risky and the organization does everything it can to ensure it makes the right decisions initially. Meetings become very important and experts are drawn in to give their opinions.

4. Process culture

The last type of Deal and Kennedy (1982) culture, process cultures, get a bad press from nearly all quarters. They are the bureaucracies, awash with red tape and memos. Their low-risk, slow feedback environment means that employees become more concerned with how work is done – the process – than with what the work is. There is a danger that artificial environments develop, detached from the real world. Employees in these cultures may be very defensive. They fear and assume that they will be attacked when they have done things incorrectly. To protect themselves they engage in behavior such as circulating emails copied to everyone remotely concerned with the issue.

Deal and Kennedy admit that this four-culture model is simplistic, but it can be a useful starting point for inspecting any organization. A mix of all four cultures may be found within a single organization. Furthermore, they suggest that companies with very strong cultures will skillfully blend the best elements of all four types in a way that allows them to remain responsive and competitive to a changing environment. Although these cultures have been criticized, for instance, because customers fear the high-risk attitudes of those in a tough guy culture or the thoughtless energy of those in a work hard/play hard culture, they exist because they bring order to organizations and ensure that certain procedures are followed. Yet only a few organizations fall neatly into one of these four types, and it is very hard to relate these types to psychological personalities.

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