Organisational culture: The Eiffel Tower organisational culture

In the blog last week, we explored the Family culture that is a common organisational arrangement in small business ventures. This week, we will investigate the extreme opposite style of the Eiffel Tower culture that reflects the operation of large-scale businesses.

Introduction to the Eiffel Tower culture

The Eiffel Tower is a hierarchical and highly bureaucratic organisational culture. The structure, policies, rules, managerial style, and employee roles throughout the organisation are determined by a small number of senior members at the very top of the pyramid. Then, in this culture, roles rather than individuals are emphasised, and line authority is also determined by role allocation.

For example, line management is typically obeyed on the premise that it is their prescribed and legitimate role to instruct other employees. Moreover, rules provide the basis of power while personal relationships are generally discouraged to prevent bias when evaluating tasks or individual performance. Motivation is largely based on an experience of a positive, dutiful adaptation to the culture and a sense of high individual achievement in a role.

The strengths and weaknesses of the culture

The primary strength of this culture is the remarkable ability to keep things the same and maintain order on a day-by-day basis. This is a challenging task given the size of the organisation, the sheer number of employees, and daily pressures arising from the requirement to constantly interact with numerous external organisations.

Then, the main weakness is that it is a conformity-based culture in which innovation and change can be limited or slow to implement even where urgently required due to pressures in the external environment.

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Question 1

What are the main disadvantages of employment in this culture?

Question 2

Why are graduates often attracted to this type of organisation?

Question 3

Can such organisations continue to survive in the modern highly competitive market environment?

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We shall explore Question 3 in the next blog.

Reference

Trompenaars, F. & Hampden-Turner, C. (1997). Riding the waves of culture: understanding cultural diversity in business. Nicholas Brealey Publishing.