As we start to mix with each other again and even (gasp!) to travel to meet, we’re reminded that cultures are different from group to group, from organization to organization, and from country to country. For groups, organizations, and nations, cultures are, to be succinct, “how things get done around here.”
Our cultural differences spur us to respond to the physical workplaces in which we find ourselves in different ways, we have varying expectations and experiences based on our cultures. Within a single organization, there can be multiple cultures, but to avoid having to say “the organizational culture found among a set of space users” over and over again in the paragraphs that follow, we’ll just refer to “organizational culture.” Also, any person is a member of multiple groups and each of those groups has a culture; below we’ll focus on the culture present as a person works and not the one present at their tennis club or the parent-teacher association to which they belong.
So, when we’re talking about workplace design, we’re focused on the implications of national and workplace organization cultures.
The system for describing national culture that has the most direct design applicability is the one developed by Hofstede. It delineates the familiar parameters of individualism-collectivism, toughness, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, and short-long term orientation. People from more individualistic cultures are, for example, more likely to choose to modify their environments than people from collectivistic ones, so spaces for them that aren’t planned with user modifications in mind can “ugly up” fast.
The organizational culture matrix developed by Cameron and Quinn, with its well-known breakdown of organizations into hierarchies, adhocracies, clans, and market cultures, also can be directly linked to particular workplace design scenarios. In adhocracies, for example, exceptional creative performance is highly prized, and users will sacrifice environmental comfort, for example, in order to achieve it; in market cultures the same goes for competing and winning (whatever contests are most pertinent for a particular group, which can range from investing treasury funds for high, high yields or buying raw materials needed for manufacturing at great prices). Hierarchies have protocols, some of which relate to design, and programming does not move forward without them (and protocols are not necessarily a bad thing). Clans are particularly focused on member welfare, but no business can survive too long without positive cash flows.
When people start to develop a space, they can wonder how to integrate national culture and organizational culture-based requirements. In any place, it’s more important to recognize the requirements imposed by national culture than organizational culture. Our national culture occupies a more central part of our psyche than those of the organizations we belong to and so spaces developed even for the same sort of organizational culture can need to vary based on the national culture in which they are embedded. A collectivistic clan is different in important ways from an individualistic clan and the spaces where each works needs to be different as well.
Designing for culture(s) can be a challenge, but when workplace design aligns with users’ national and organizational cultures, stress levels fall, performance rises, and wellbeing abounds.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections (www.researchdesignconnections.com), a monthly subscription newsletter and free daily blog, where recent and classic research in the social, design, and physical sciences that can inform designers’ work are presented in straightforward language. Readers learn about the latest research findings immediately, before they’re available elsewhere. Sally, who is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, is also the author of Place Advantage: Applied Psychology for Interior Architecture (Wiley, 2009) and, with Cindy Coleman, The Designer’s Guide to Doing Research: Applying Knowledge to Inform Design (Wiley, 2012). She is a principal at Design with Science (www.designwithscience.com) and can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.