Three cultures of management: the key to organizational learning (Edgar Schein)

Why do organizations fail to learn how to learn and therefore remain competitively marginal? In this article, I try to explain why organizational innovations either don’t occur or fail to survive and proliferate. Some typical explanations revolve around vague concepts of “resistance to change” or “human nature” or failures of “leadership.” I propose a more fundamental reason for such learning failures, derived from the fact that in every organization there are three particular cultures among its subcultures, two of which have their roots outside the organization and are therefore more fundamentally entrenched in their particular assumptions. Every organization develops an internal culture based on its operational success, what I call the “operator culture.” But every organization also has, in its various functions, the designers and technocrats who drive the core technologies. I call this the “engineering culture;” their fundamental reference group is their worldwide occupational community. Every organization also has its executive management, the CEO and his or her immediate subordinates — what I call the “executive culture.” CEOs, because of the nature of their jobs and the structure of the capital markets, also constitute a worldwide occupational community in the sense that they have common problems that are unique to their roles. These three cultures are often not aligned with each other.