Hello and welcome to an introduction to the competing values framework
my name is Richard, and I am the Chief Systems Developer for
Online Talent Manager
a psychological test distributor based in the Netherlands.
So let's start at the beginning. Throughout the 20th century
companies were looking for the silver bullet.
How can I be the best company?
Lots of models and theories were put forth
but in 1983 John Rohrbaugh and Robert Quinn
took all these models and put them together into a single
comprehensive framework and they also looked at individual companies
and did some research into what was making them successful
What came out of the research was that all companies are in the middle of
performing too separate balancing acts. The first deals with
focus are the focused on the inside, an internal focus
or are they focused on the outside, an external focus?
And the second balancing act deals with stability.
Are they looking more for control or are they looking more for flexibility?
Now when we put these two balancing act together
that gives us four kinds of organizational culture.
Robert Quinn and Kim Cameron
created a short survey questionnaire and some explanations about the different
kinds of corporate cultures that these these four areas represented.
In the top right-hand side, we see the intersection between
an external focus and a focus on flexibility.
We call that kind of culture an Adhocracy.
An Adhocracy culture is focused on being open,
innovative, generating new ideas, and putting things together in unusual ways,
creating synergy.
In the bottom right-hand side, I see a company that's externally focused
and looking for more control. We call this a Market-Oriented company.
In a Market-Oriented company, they're really focused on the bottom line
the focused on competition, they're looking at the market, they're looking at
what their clients want.
They are really focused on making money.
In the bottom left, I see the intersection between an
internally focused company, a company focused on what is going on
inside their doors,
and control. Here's where you find a company that's really focused on
procedures and documentation,
quality, and creating hierarchies.
And we call that a Hierarchy.
In the top left, we see a kind of culture that's focused on the inside and
flexibility.
We call this a Family culture because they're focused more on
personal growth and cooperation. You can see it as an
organization that cares about the people. Now that they are all in a single graph
you can see how the cultures on opposite sides the graph
are competing with each other. For instance,
if I look at the top right and bottom left, I see Adhocracy and Hierarchy.
now if I'm an Adhocracy, I'm focused on new ideas and creating things,
in thinking outside the box.
Those are diametrically opposed to the focus
of a Hierarchy. Hierarchies want order and
incremental improvement. I like what Jeff DeGraff once said,
"The best way to kill creativity and new ideas is to put a procedure
around it."
I think that is a very apt. These two drives are put pulling in different
directions, they're competing with each other.
You see that on the other axis as well. In the top left-hand side I'm
focused on the Family in making sure people are happy.
In the bottom-right, I don't care about the people on the inside,
I'm focused on the market. I'm here to make some money and be competitive.
Those two things are clashing with each other. But the truth is that an
organization must be competent in
all these areas in order to be successful.
A company might lean in one direction or another but all these things need to be
done.
You can innovate the most amazing products,
but if you can't bring them to market, if you can't make them dependably,
if you can't keep your employees from quitting immediately,
then that organization will fail.
So this model is a good way of explaining, in a nutshell,
Organizational Culture, but it can also be used to describe
Communication Styles and Management Styles.
But it's not quite fine-grained enough for dealing with
individual work styles. In 1989 and early 90's
Robert Quinn wrote a book called, "Becoming a Master Manager."
He was looking at using the competing values framework to describe how a
manager should behave.
He was seeing the perfect manager
as someone who was covering all the bases in a good way.
All we've talk about so far as we're looking at the organization
as we're looking at an individual,
is how people behave. How a company behaves.
Do you remember the iceberg model I talked about the last presentation?
Well behavior is just the tip of the iceberg, whereas all that stuff under the
water is something we
need to think about. In the late 90's
Bert Goos and Andre Tjoa were really enamored with Quinn's
model. They read "Becoming a Master Manager" and the model
and behaviors described in it, and they said, "That's awesome!
We should use that ourselves!" Since we are really good at developing
tests, we can look for the personality factors
that are driving those behaviors. And so they wrote the
Octogram Test. The Octogram test is the only psychometrically valid test for
this model
and has been proven over the last 12 years by testing over a hundred
thousand candidates. Since the Octogram test
is describing behaviors,
we can communicate a lot of different things through this model.
We can communicate work styles, organizational culture,
communication and management styles, and personality
through the lens of the competing values framework. You can see how
all these personality factors influence real-life behavior
in the workplace. The next series of videos will look at
individual tests and describe what they measure and how you should interpret the results
but in all these cases, their results are translated into the competing values
framework so that you can see
how these, sometimes esoteric, things that we're measuring
actually influence real life behavior in the workplace.
Thank you for your attention.