What makes Character-based Culture so powerful? Where’s the proof to support this premise?
In conducting an in-depth ethnographic study of an organization that claimed its character-based culture yielded significantly greater outcomes, benefits and revenues, several questions drove us. Among them: “What does a character-based culture look like?” and “What is the impact of character on business performance?”
The answers to these questions reside in understanding Organizational Energy, Design and Character.
The five articles that follow are meant to enhance what you already know about human and organizational behavior and to continue the process of life-long learning. Whether you are a business executive, consultant or academic, these articles rooted in evidence-based research will not only help you understand the key underlying principles behind exceptional organizational and human performance. They will expand your existing knowledge to new heights.
We strongly suggest you read the topics in the order presented below since each article builds on the foundation of preceding articles:
1. Understanding Core Concepts of Character-based Culture.
2. Building Character-based Culture from the Bottom Up.
3. Building Organizational Energy.
4. Directing Organizational Energy.
5. Organizational Energy: Application in Real Life.
Critical Concept #1: Attention
To understand character-based culture, one must understand how the human mind works, especially with the process called attention.
The human brain processes thousands of operations every minute. Processes that one assumes to happen automatically, such as reacting to brake lights in traffic or changing lanes in heavy traffic, take a series of complex mental operations that occur in fractions of a second.
The attention process retrieves “the appropriate references from memory,” evaluates the event and conditions, and selects the “right thing to do” from stored memory with lightning-fast timing.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychologist who pioneered the concept of “flow” (the state of optimal consciousness we will discuss further in Critical Concept #2), noted,
“Retrieving information from memory storage and bringing it into the focus of awareness, comparing information, evaluating, deciding – all make demands on the minds’ limited processing capacity.”
Some people learn how to use the “priceless” gift of attention wisely and efficiently, but “others waste it.”
The concept of attention is important because attention is a form of energy, psychic energy to be exact, which is necessary for getting work done.
Without attention, “no work can be done and in doing work [attention] is dissipated.” How one invests psychic energy determines how thoughts, feelings, and memories will be shaped and used.
Csikszentmihalyi stated,
“Experience depends on the way we invest psychic energy on the structure of attention.”
This structuring depends on the self because the creation of each experience in the mind depends upon the amount of attention or psychic energy one devotes to the event. Thus, “attention shapes the self, and is in turn shaped by it.”
To direct attention, one must be conscious, but perceptions of external events can affect psychic energy positively or negatively.
These events can also affect quality of life at the same time. Psychic disorder, or psychic entropy, adversely affects consciousness and attention by feeding information to the brain that “conflicts with existing intentions” or distracts one from carrying out intentions.
Emotions such as fear, rage, anxiety or jealousy can easily force the diversion of attention to undesirable or negative objects. Psychic entropy can easily dissipate attention, leaving one physically as well as mentally exhausted.
Critical Concept #2: Flow, the Optimal Experience
Opposite to psychic entropy is the optimal experience where information that flows into consciousness is “congruent with goals” and “psychic energy flows effortlessly.”
Within the optimal experience, “positive feedback strengthens the self, and more attention is freed to deal with the outer and the inner environment [sic].”
The order that exists within consciousness as the result of the optimal experience is known as flow, which is a key concept within the culture of character.
Critical Concept #3: Transcendence within the Culture of Character
Michael Pratt and Blake Ashforth are two organizational behavior scholars who have published influential papers on organizational identification – essentially, exploring how employees develop psychological attachments to their organizations and professional identities.
Pratt and Ashforth stated,
“Individuals actively desire and seek meaningfulness in their lives and work.”
By meaningful, we mean that the work and/or its context are perceived by its practitioners to be, at minimum, purposeful and significant.
To be meaningful, one must give attention to the work and dissipate psychic energy to gain the optimal experience.
Meaningfulness exists in two forms: (a) meaningfulness in work and (b) meaningfulness at work.
Meaningfulness in work centers primarily on the person through employee involvement and job redesign practices. Callings that fall within this category involve identity and meaningfulness through roles in medicine, teaching, or public service like police officers.
Meaningfulness at work includes “organizations that focus only on enriching one’s organizational membership – and not the work that one does.”
Pratt and Ashforth declare meaningfulness at work to be embodied by organizations that build communities through visionary, charismatic, or transformational leadership, comprehensive ideologies, and collective-level identities.
Another form of meaningfulness exists that transcends the other two forms.
Pratt and Ashforth noted that transcendence includes “three loosely coupled phenomena: (a) a connection to something greater than oneself…(b) an integration of the various aspects of oneself, such as identities and traits, into a roughly coherent system…and (c) self-development, a realization of one’s aspirations and potential.”
According to Pratt and Ashforth, the key to transcendence is a:
Comprehensive system of beliefs that connects and explains “who one is” (identity) and who belongs (membership), what matters (values) and what is to be done (purpose), how and why things hang together…to constitute “reality” and “truth” (ideology), [and] how one is embedded in that reality and connects to what matters and what is to be done (transcendence) (Ashforth & Vaidyanath, 2002: 361).
The culture of character more closely resembles the model of transcendence, which has significant consequences when one also considers the concepts of flow and psychic energy. Yet these concepts alone are still inadequate for explaining how the organization under study achieves exceptional performance. The concept of positive deviance serves as the last piece of the puzzle.
Critical Concept #4: Positive Deviance
Gretchen Spreitzer and Scott Sonenshein are management scholars who’ve done influential work on how people and organizations can thrive and flourish, even in the most challenging of circumstances.
The two of them noted, “Deviant behavior is not expected – it is unconventional… [and] departs from institutional expectations (Merton, 1968).”
Scholars and organizational psychologists define deviance as “intentional behavior that significantly departs from norms.” Although most professional literature “focuses on negative behaviors, departures from norms can also be positive or constructive (Warren, in press).”
Spreitzer and Sonenshein defined positive deviance as “intentional behaviors that depart from the norms of a referent group in honorable ways.” They noted that virtuous and honorable are synonymous. Thus, virtuous behaviors are positive deviations from the norms of society.
Positive deviance is important in understanding applications of the two dimensions of character.
Performance character is about doing the best job that one can do, and moral character is about being the best person one can be toward others.
Thus, performance and moral character represent honorable or virtuous behaviors. To exercise character means one is positively deviant with societal norms.
Within a character-based culture, behaviors between and among employees would not appear positively deviant because employees would be living and acting according to the same norms, but the same behaviors might look entirely different to an outsider not familiar with internal standards.
Such is the case with Omega, the company studied to understand “Character-based Culture.” Comments from clients, customers, and suppliers reflected how external parties were positively impressed with the service they received at every level of the company.
The surprise with which some external parties responded reflected that they met the unexpected, which deviated from the norm to which they were accustomed. The fact that clients and customers consistently expressed being “wowed” would indicate that Omega employees were clearly doing something different, which drew attention and repeat business.
Conclusion
The four critical concepts presented within this article – attention, flow, transcendence, and positive deviance – set a character-based culture apart from all others because of the synergy that exists between and among them. If any is absent, the culture fails to achieve its full potential. The next article in this series explains the foundation for building a character-based culture from the bottom up.
About the Author:
Dr. Ray Benedetto is co-founder of GuideStar, Inc.® a practice in organizational leadership and design for performance excellence (www.guidestarinc.com). He is a retired Air Force colonel with a distinguished active-duty military career as a transformation leader and change agent. He is board certified in Healthcare Management and a Life Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives (ACHE). He taught leadership and strategic planning for 12 years in the MBA Program for the University of Phoenix Chicago Campus and holds degrees from Penn State (BS), the University of Southern California (MSSM), and the University of Phoenix (DM). He is co-author of “It’s My Company TOO! How Entangled Companies Move Beyond Engagement for Remarkable Results” (Greenleaf Book Press Group, 2012) and numerous ezine articles available online. You can reach him at ray@guidestarinc.com.
[i] This article is an excerpt from a doctoral dissertation titled “An Ethnographic Study of Character-based Culture in a Small Business Setting” by Dr. Ramon L. Benedetto (UMI No. 3394574) published in 2009. Features such as bolding, italics, and underlining were added after initial publication to guide the reader’s eyes to prominent thoughts and sources within the text. With few exceptions the text below appears verbatim as it appeared on pages 404 through 408 of the source document.
[ii] See Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1990). Flow: The psychology of optimal experience. New York, NY: Harper Collins, p. 31.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] Ibid, p. 31.
[v] Ibid, p. 31.
[vi] Ibid, p. 31.
[vii] Ibid.
[viii] Ibid, p. 33.
[ix] Ibid.
[x] Ibid, p. 35.
[xi] Ibid, p. 34.
[xii] Ibid, p. 36.
[xiii] Ibid.
[xiv] Ibid, p. 39.
[xv] Ibid, p. 39.
[xvi] See Pratt, M. G., & Ashforth, B. E. (2003). Fostering meaningfulness in working and at work. In S. Srivastva & D. Cooperrider Appreciative management and leadership (Rev. ed.) (pp. 309-327). Euclid, OH: Williams Custom Publishing. P. 310.
[xvii] Ibid.
[xviii] Ibid, p. 317.
[xix] Ibid, p. 322.
[xx] Ibid, p. 323.
[xxi] See Spreitzer, G. M., & Sonenshein, S. (2003). Positive deviance and extraordinary organizing. In S. Srivastva & D. Cooperrider Appreciative management and leadership (Rev. ed.) (pp. 207-224). Euclid, OH: Williams Custom Publishing. p. 208.
[xxii] Ibid.
[xxiii] Ibid, p. 209.
[xxiv] Ibid.
[xxv] Ibid.
[xxvi] See Lickona, T. & Davidson, M. (2005). Smart & good high schools: Integrating excellent and ethics for success in school, work and beyond. Cortland, NY: Center for the 4th and 5th Rs (Respect & Responsibility)/Washington, D.C.: Character Education Partnership.
[xxvii] For the purposes of the initial study, the name of the real-life company in which the research was done had to be masked in accordance with academic policies. The name “Omega” was used when referring specifically to the company. For background, Omega is an award-winning, top-performing service company in northwest Illinois that provides catering, event planning and production, corporate gifts, and related services throughout the greater Chicagoland region. Its reputation is built on exceptional food and exceptional staff, which are important market differentiators in exceeding expectations of clients and guests alike.