With some regularity, I hear fraternity and sorority leaders say, vis-a-vis hazing, “We have to change the culture.” In the rare occurrence that they specify what they mean by “culture,” it often turns on something simple. “We need more brotherhood.” “We need old-heads to stop telling war stories.” “We need collegiate members to stop abusing alcohol.” “We need collegiate members to stop turning to physical violence.” I don’t deny that each of these elements plays a role in hazing. I don’t doubt that they’re part of the “culture.” However, I’m not convinced that we even know what we’re contemplating when we talk about “culture.” As such, we don’t have a good sense of what comprises it in the context of hazing.
Organizational culture is the shared beliefs and values of organization members that provide meaning to, and influence, engagement within the organization. Members express these shared beliefs in organizational life through various visible manifestations such as leadership, management, strategy, operations, and broader traditions. Organizational culture is the unifying force that brings people together to work toward the attainment of organizational goals. It’s the glue that holds organizations together.
Occasionally, an organization is characterized by dysfunction. As a general matter, a dysfunctional organization exhibits markedly lower effectiveness, efficiency, and performance than peer-organizations. Internal forces within the organization play a pivotal role in the dysfunction, and those forces are largely cultural. In such instances, an organization must undergo a shift in its culture. However, organizational culture can be a strong enabler or an insurmountable obstacle to implementing change in organizations.
Where change is possible, someone—or some group—within the organization must lead that change. Organizational culture, however, partially mediates the relationship between the leader’s change-promoting behavior and change readiness—i.e., organization members’ capacity to change. The strategic change in an organization involves transformation efforts to ensure the survival and sustained growth of the organization. Transformational leadership plays a pivotal role in its ability to escalate readiness for culture change among organization members. Organizational culture either facilitates or hinders the smooth transformation during this process.
Scholars have developed principles and practices that have helped leaders realign their organizational cultures to support their strategic change goals. The principles range from understanding the magnitude and nature of change required to using multiple levers to effect change, both instrumental and symbolic. A few of the practices needed for cultural realignment include establishing an infrastructure and oversight, defining the preferred culture, and ensuring that leaders are modeling and teaching the preferred culture. At its core is understanding what the culture is that needs changing and the new culture for which the organization is striving.
In the context of hazing, “culture” is likely to be much broader and expansive than we imagine. It likely touches on things and beliefs that plaintiffs’ lawyers, victims, victims’ parents, consultants, experts, as well as organization leaders and members believe and hold sacrosanct. Changing the culture around hazing will only come when we collectively dig deep, unearth hazing for all its breadth, depth, and complexity, and embrace that—whatever it is—in its totality and address it.
Gregory S. Parks is currently working on a book about hazing in African American fraternities and sororities, tentatively titled Death March.