The president of Advanced Systems Corp.wants the company to have a strong organizational culture around a specific set of values.As a vice-president, you are concerned that the president may be trying to strengthen the culture too much thereby creating a corporate cult.Describe three potential problems with having an organizational culture that is too strong.

Organizations with strong cultures are potentially more effective than those with weak cultures.However, strong cultures can create problems under four conditions.Students may identify any three of these for this question.
First, a strong culture is ineffective if the values, beliefs and assumptions are incompatible with the external environment.For example, an organization with a strong technological efficiency culture will be more effective if this helps the organization to adapt better to the external environment and satisfy the needs of dominant stakeholders.In contrast, cultural values that are incompatible with the external environment will steer the organization away from the direction it should be headed and encourage employees to engage in behaviors that are dysfunctional in the long term.
Second, a company's culture might be so strong that employees blindly focus on the mental model shaped by that culture.Mental models produce a set of assumptions on which we base our decisions and actions.When an organization's culture intensely emphasizes customer service, for example, employees tend to see problems as customer service problems even though some are really problems about efficiency or technology.Thus, strong cultures might cause decision makers to overlook or incorrectly define subtle misalignments between the organization's activities and the changing environment.
Third, the stronger the culture, the more it suppresses dissenting values.In the long term, this prevents organizations from nurturing new cultural values that might emerge into dominant values as the environment changes.For this reason, corporate leaders need to recognize that healthy organizations have subcultures with dissenting values that may produce dominant values in the future.
Lastly, some companies have a strong culture, but they do not have an adaptive culture.An adaptive culture focuses employees on the changing needs of customers and other stakeholders and supports initiative and leadership to keep pace with these changes.Without an adaptive culture, employees are resistant to change and, consequently, will not adapt to a changing environment.