Healthdyne Organizational Culture

I Can’t Do It All!”

For twenty years, Healthdyne, a health maintenance organization [HMO] that served the northern California Bay Area, was run by president Amanda Huggins. Recognized as an expert in the managed care industry, Ms. Huggins successfully carried out the organizations mission and set the statewide standard for excellence and responsiveness until her retirement. However, during her tenure at Healthdyne she was known to constantly micromanage her staff. The culture she had instilled within the organization made it extremely difficult for her replacement, Arnold Brice, to effectively run the HMO after her departure. Despite being fully capable of fulfilling their managerial responsibilities, the executive staff would look to Brice

Its meaning can range from something as simple as “the way we do things around here” (Balogun, & Hailey, 2004) to a more complex explanation such as “the pattern of shared basic assumptions; invented, discovered or developed by a given group as it learns to cope with its problems of external adaptation and internal integration, that has worked well enough to be considered valid and therefore be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think and feel in relationship to those problems” (Schien,

The management and its style of handling the employees also affect the culture of the workplace. There are certain organizations where the management allows the employees to take their own decisions and let them participate in strategy making. In such a culture, employees get attached to their management and look forward to a long term association with the organization. The management must respect the employees to avoid a culture where the employees just work for money and nothing else. In doing so, they treat the organization as a mere source of earning money and look for a change in a short span of time.

Model for Interpreting an HCO's Culture

Within the same organization, various departments such as housekeeping, accounting, surgery, marketing etc. may have distinct and different cultures known as subcultures. Even though subcultures vary in some ways from the main culture, they exist to support the overall organizational culture as much as possible. For smooth running of an HCO, leaders should have a strong overall culture, yet allow individual departments the flexibility to have their own subcultures as well (Olden, 2015).

Managing and shaping