Administrative Culture in South Asia: Can it Facilitate Organizational Change?

Organisations and managers all over the world have learned, the hard way, that drawing-table based, highly structured and meticulously planned organizational change specially in public organizations does not always work. The... [ view full abstract ]

Organisations and managers all over the world have learned, the hard way, that drawing-table based, highly structured and meticulously planned organizational change specially in public organizations does not always work. The complexity of change, combined with the peculiarities of organisational behaviour, makes controlled change difficult. Organisational change involves a lot more than simply rolling out well-designed strategies. Changing an organisation is is not a highly controlled, single act of creation, but rather an evolution to a desired end. In many cases engineered change becomes an illusion because of its non compatibility with administrative culture. This paper focuses on the interrelationship between the administrative culture and organizational change in South Asian civil service. It seeks to examine the perceived relationship between these two important phenomena related to organizational behavior. The dimensions of national culture suggested by Hofstede have been used as an analytical framework to explain the cultural perspectives of organizational change. Hofstede’s four cultural dimensions--- power distance, uncertainty avoidance, individualism vs. collectivism and masculinity vs. femininity---- have been used  to  search   for the  link  between  administrative culture and organizational change (both planned and organic change) and to  examine  the norms, values and customs  as visible in the  South Asian administrative system. Sensitivity to the wider system is a crucial condition for successful adaptation and change. An organization is sensitive to the wider system if it accepts the multiple interactions and the fundamental interdependence between the different actors and factors. ‘Sensitivity to the system’ implies that an organization accepts that many of its actions are not autonomous and they, in turn, produce unintended responses. There are evidences from South East and East Asian countries which indicate that many of their organizational changes were successful because of the compatibility between change initiatives and their administrative culture (primarily driven by Confucianism). South Asian experiences are not much encouraging. In most of the cases the change initiatives of South Asian public service failed to utilize the administrative culture in an organic and positive manner to achieve intended results.