Rituals and ceremonies – Schools are full of rituals and ceremonies, which are often used to develop and maintain its organisational culture according to its members. The organisation has opportunities both internally and to the external environment to promote its goals, values, beliefs and examples of ‘good’.
O’Neill (1994, p.104) talks about schools and colleges needing to relate successfully to their external environment and that changes in behaviour of the organisational culture help modify established norms and values. He goes on to say that tangible manifestations of culture are of primary importance within the organisation. They help to promote and reinforce that translation of cultural values into appropriate norms and behaviour.
Heroes and Heroines (those individual success stories consistent with the desired organisational culture) are given a special status and celebrated sometimes to convince peers/colleagues to emulate their behaviour, thus promoting the values, beliefs and ideologies of that particular organisation.
Beare et al. (1989, p.186) suggests that the organisational culture of an educational institution is expressed in three ways:
- Conceptually or verbally – e.g. definition of the curriculum, use of language and the identification of organisational aims and objectives.
- Behaviourally – e.g. rituals, ceremonies, pedagogy, rules, support mechanisms and patterns of social interaction.
- Visually – e.g. facilities and equipment, memorabilia and mottoes, crests and uniforms.
O’Neill (1994, p.107) identifies four interdependent elements of organisational activities which contribute to the prevailing culture
- Purpose – the official educational purposes of the organisation and the interpretation of those purposes by the people who work in the organisation and its immediate educational community.
- Symbolism – the implicit messages which particular pedagogies, management structures and styles, and ceremonies and rituals convey.
- Networks – the way people in the organisation communicate, meet and work together in all areas of the organisational activity.
- Integration – the extent to which disparate area of activities and different groups of people are brought together and given opportunities to share in a unifying and unified organisational culture, (Beare 1989).
INVESTIGATION.
The research tool elected for use was by a questionnaire (Refer to Appendix B for the actual questionnaire used). This came about after initially discussing with colleagues attitudes towards management styles, issues and decisions, and the emerging culture that existed in TSI. It soon became apparent that without an anonymous individualised form of data collection, many views would be ignored, ‘kept secret’ and/or could easily be influenced by the dynamics of any group discussion. It was also important to empower the respondent to freely give his views.
The questions (actually statements) themselves were designed to reflect those initial thoughts from discussions with colleagues, and then streamlining into the four main management functions of planning, organising, leading and controlling as indicated in the literature review. Within these four, other issues such as: Aims and objectives (statements 1,2), setting and methods of achieving goals (3-10,16), planning of student related issues (11-15), organising resources (17-22), leadership (23,24), incentives and rewards (25-41), communications (42-45), rapport and relationships (46-57) and controlling (58-61) were discussed.
Rather than a simple yes/no response type questionnaire, it was more accurate to rate responses, indicating to some degree the strength of agreement of a statement. Many of the statements and resulting responses dealt with peoples opinions and attitudes, which rarely produce such polarised responses as yes or no. There were 6 possible responses: strongly agree, moderately agree, neutral, moderately disagree, strongly disagree and unable to rate.
Due to the impersonal nature of the questionnaire and the implicit difficulty in sensing whether responses were complete true feelings of the respondent, it became important to follow up the questionnaire with interviews, ensuring that the full benefit had been achieved from the questionnaire.
Interviews were loosely structured basically to allow the individual to speak freely about his views and give the interviewer the chance to use probing questions to achieve a clearer understanding by more complex responses from the interviewee. This worked fairly well, in that many of the interviewees were focussed in their thinking from the questionnaire. Through the interviews it was noticed that much thought had gone into their responses, probably due to the resulting discussions that took place around the institution from the questionnaire.
The sample was limited to a total of twenty lecturers and the follow up interviews to ten. All questionnaires were completed.
Mean values for responses were calculated for 20 staff members, 10 were foreigners from UK, and 10 were foreigners from Arabic speaking countries. (There were no local members of the lecturing staff from UAE.
In order to help aggregate the data into an entity, mean values were used. Responses that were ‘strongly agree’ were assigned a rating of 1, ‘moderately agree’ was given a 2, ‘neutral’ – 3, ‘moderately disagree’ – 4, ‘strongly disagree’ – 5. The calculated mean value was then rounded to the nearest whole number value and then translated back to the appropriate response. For example, for statement 1 – ‘The interview for employment at TSI was professionally run’ 5 responded ‘strongly agree’, 11 – ‘moderately agree’, 2 – ‘neutral’, 2 – ‘moderately disagree’, 0 – ‘strongly disagree’.
So the mean value becomes: (1x5) + (2x11) + (3x2) + (4x2) + (5x0) = 2.05
20
Rounding gives us a value of 2, which translates to a mean response for our sample that ‘moderately agrees’ with the statement. Where one person responded with ‘unable to rate’ the sample was reduced to 19 and reasons for this response were then investigated at the interview stage.
ANALYSIS.
Refer to appendix A for the results of the Staff survey.
It was surprising to discover from statement 1 that most lecturers said they were unaware of the aims and objectives of the institution, their focus was to teach the curriculum given to them. I got a sense that lecturers felt they were working in isolation and rarely felt part of the institution as a whole. This idea was reinforced by comments made in follow up interviews with the lecturers that there was very little collaboration or cooperation in solving problems, or even in the planning of units goals or standards (statements 4-10). Lecturers said they experienced short-term quick fix solutions (statement 3) to problems ranging from student discipline (statement 14), curriculum changes (statement 20) and even personal issues such as visiting a doctor (statements 40,41). There were no overriding procedures (statement 44) to deal with even the simplest of issues, often the same problems would arise 3 or 4 times, and would be dealt with in a different manner each time depending on which officer was presented with the problem.
Lecturers would get to know different officers viewpoints, then carefully select which officer to approach with the problem to achieve a favourable outcome. Often the teachers felt to get advantaged they would need to form good relationships with one or two particular officers, just to get certain jobs done, this was indicated by statements 45-47, and more so in statement 50 on using behind the scenes lobbying to gain power, influence and access to resources.
Lecturers felt that officers revelled what can be crudely said as attention. Many officers had little to do during the day, and in a strange way were grateful for the task. They would try and take ownership of the problem, even if they were not competent to do so, lecturers would often say that by giving them problems to solve, they would feel important and powerful. Consequently would try to please the lecturers with favourable outcomes, but often final decisions would be out of their hands. This would frustrate lecturers more because indications from officers would be ‘don’t worry it will all work out we are doing our best for you….’ Then finish off with ‘inshallah,’ which actually means if Allah wills it. But was loosely meant as ‘I don’t really know what is going to happen, the decision is out of my hands.’ This only fuelled an impression that many pieces of information that were passed down from a central command were never fully understood by the UAE nationals that ran TSI, they just followed orders, ignored implications and invented their own reasons for the orders.
Not only did lecturers feel that they were poorly managed and had to use what they saw as unprofessional tactics to get the job done, equally officers were thought of as being managed poorly, as they were not equipped, trained or even competent enough to do their jobs. There was an over-powering feeling that it is all about who you know, not what you know, it was felt by lecturers that this ran from the lowest paid menial worker all the way up to the commander himself. Many thought that officers were appointed based on family connections, or contacts in higher positions of that society.
Many felt that this was true of the whole country, and all institutions and organisations were run a similar manner, especially with the governments focus on ‘emiratisation’ which was trying to get a larger population of local Arabs into employment, so that the country was not so reliant on foreign manpower. Many of them needed to be trained by foreigners, but at the same time the local Arabs were given power in management positions over the more talented foreigners. It was unfortunate that many of these local Arabs entering employment were ignored and business was running as usual around them as they were not trusted to effectively or competently carry out particular jobs, many of them were left sitting around all day drinking coffee. This was similar to the situation at the Technical studies Institute, where very small, simple tasks were given to these officers, they were often given management positions over the far more talented foreign staff, who in turn felt frustrated in not being given the authority to run the institute, which they felt could be run far more efficiently and effectively.
Students had some opportunities for reward (statement 15), unfortunately many of the prize giving ceremonies took place where disappointed lecturers were not invited, or informed even in those cases where lecturers were directly responsible for the subject area for which the students were being awarded. These ceremonies took place on the parade ground, in many cases before lectures, which began at 7:00 a.m. Once a year a graduation parade took place, which was universally attended and full of pomp and circumstance, with often nationally respected military dignitaries present. It is a well rehearsed extravaganza and a strong example of the behavioural and visual expression of the organisational culture.
Staff Development for lecturers was non-existent (statement 19), when I questioned a senior officer why this was so, the response I received was surprising, “we carefully select lecturers from overseas that have already received a wealth of training, if they needed any more development we wouldn’t employ them.” Many western staff felt that there lack of training, especially in dealing with students quite new to the English language and secondly themselves being new to the Islamic culture often caused them problems which could have been eradicated with some staff development. The area of using technology in the classrooms was noticeably absent, lecturers were not encouraged to use these, even though facilities were available. Lecturers felt that the local Arabs were equally in dire need of training, especially in management and organisation skills, as these seemed to be the roles that they were entering.
Curriculum was another major worry, all lecturers responded to statement 20 as strongly disagreeing to seeing the curriculum being reviewed and updated regularly. After probing questions, I found that lecturers of the same subject area were not even communicating with each other, they would teach to the best of their abilities, modifying the curriculum independently, but this would not be a shared, coordinated effort, which was ironic, as I found that the lecturers wouldn’t even dream about working in this way in their previous jobs.
Many of the lecturers felt that examination results were probably the greatest indicator of what teaching was going on in TSI, and that the officers looked at these more closely than any other indicator of a lecturer’s performance. Lecturers thought that as students were paid a high salary to be at the college, it is easy to continuously fail exams, repeat a year and in a way make a career of failing exams, student’s salaries would not really be affected. Examinations would often test memory rather than skills. Lecturers mentioned that this was the case as many students had just begun learning the English language. Others argued that exams were purposely made easy to indicate a high pass rate, at the cost of a good standard of education. Often well motivated students were taught by a select few lecturers that held doctorate or masters degrees who were chosen by officers. Lecturers felt that some of their colleagues had become very complacent and lazy, compromising on educational standards, as examination results could be easily passed or explained away.
A key issue was that of innovation, foreign lecturers strongly disagreed with statement 25 that innovation was highly valued. Lecturers claimed that many of the local officers would listen very carefully to fully understand new ideas and then discourage the idea based on ‘it wouldn’t be practical to implement at the TSI’, or say ‘the commander will not go for that here.’ Often the officers would then present the ideas as their own, to get recognition for ‘their abilities’ and hope for further power influence and promotion. The foreign staff could see this going on, and some lecturers would play the game, as they new that if the officer receives more power and influence, they could use his new connections, power and influence for their own purposes. The officer is obviously impressed with the lecturers’ viewpoint, as he ‘stole’ his idea, presenting it as his own, and therefore would listen more keenly for any further ideas. Often ideas would be passed on with the lecturers’ own agenda in mind. This worked well for some lecturers as there were no promotions, incentives or chances to develop (statements 27,29,50), they would never directly have influence or power over such things as curriculum, examinations, funding of facilities, distribution of workloads, choosing who the heroes of the organisation were, hiring, firing, etc., except by manipulating influential officers.
The ‘clever’ lecturers that were ‘in-with’ the officers seemed to get an easier ride, they even and had power over their colleagues. They often kept their cards very close to their chests and in some cases given the role of a section supervisor. It was thought that these section supervisors were preventing communication directly from the lecturer to an officer and even the officers would prevent communication between lecturers and senior officers, or the commander, so that their own power and influence would be maintained in the eyes of their respective supervisors (statements 42-56). The most innovative ideas came from the lecturers, which went up this chain of command, but at each stage supervisors would take it and present it as their own ideas, consequently many of the lecturers would implement change, or improvements by themselves and keep it to themselves (statement 8). Lecturers felt that the only real indication of their abilities would be highlighted in examination results, and then the senior officers would pay attention, and realise where the talent lay. Unfortunately many of the lecturers that had been there for a long time, and the officers they had influence over had arms that spread throughout the institution and often blinded the senior officers into thinking that good management skills were the reason that lecturers were performing so well and that the students were so successful.
From statements 30 to 38, most lecturers felt that their only reward was financial in nature, on the surface the salary was substantial. The salary structure was peculiar, in that all western teachers would get the same salary regardless of qualifications, experience or family situations. TSI lecturers’ were on the whole either young, at the beginning of their career, or single older men at the end of their career. Middle aged, married men were few and far between, probably due to the expensive educational costs for children, relatively small housing allowances and a lack of professional development.
One of the biggest issues that foreign Arab lecturers’ came across was the discrepancy in their salaries, they earned about 65% less in comparison to their western colleagues. Many of them were educated in western universities and carry out exactly the same duties as the western lecturers, many as competently, if not more so. Initially I thought that this sub-group was formed for this reason alone, but on questioning the foreign Arab staff, it became clear that even though they felt the situation was unfair and that their salaries should be higher, nearly all of them had a strong belief in God, and believed that the amount of money that they will earn in their lifetime is pre-destined, so there was little point in making such an issue out of what was a relatively trivial point. A sub-culture was formed based on language and religion amongst the foreign lecturers where the Muslim Arab lecturers shared a bond through their language. The Christian and Muslim lecturers form the western world that didn’t speak Arabic felt they couldn’t wholly be part of this group. Sometimes the western staff would be a little suspicious of conversations with the local Arab officers, primarily because they were not sure of what was being said, or what behind the scenes tactics were taking place. This balkanised culture that was the TSI had sub-groups that often competed with each other for influence over rapidly promoted local Arabs, who in the near future would weald a lot of influence and power due to new connections.
The controlling function of management seemed to be ignored by the management, and when designing the questionnaire, it was interesting that lecturers spent so little time discussing this area. Lecturers felt that management didn’t get involved until a problem/complaint arose, they went further saying it was possible to go through an employment contract (2 years) not knowing who their officer in charge actually was, as long as you kept your head down and didn’t bring attention to yourself. The feeling of being autonomous in the classroom gave teachers a sense of freedom. Often lecturers would complain about the job, but regularly say they enjoyed their time in the classroom. There were biannual classroom observations for each lecturer, but these were carried out to highlight only the severest problems, The officers that would carry out the process, knew very little about education, and definitely had no training in how to assess a lecturers performance.
All students, officers, foreign Arabic speaking staff and about a quarter of the western staff were Muslim and had beliefs and values based on the Islamic religion. This became the underlying culture at the TSI. Ceremonies and rituals always began and ended with Allah in mind. The working day would be broken for prayers, where students, lecturers and officers lined up together to face Allah in prayer. This was the only time that one felt that an officers position was equal to that of a poor-achieving student. It was here that strong relationships were thought to have formed. Some of the western non-Muslim staff felt excluded and managed to form their own relationships with those Muslims amongst the officers, lecturers and students that didn’t pray, or even went out drinking on the quiet (considered an act against the Islamic religion).
Noticeable shared Islamic traditions were washing rituals, prayer, men with beards, respect for non-Muslims, concern for others, friendly relationships more caring and nurturing in attitude perhaps at the cost of progress, avoiding conflict where possible (western staff really noticed that there were never any flared tempers, or arguments, the Muslim officers and students would always back down first) recognising and respecting a hierarchy in authority as is expected through the family structure that Arabs adhere to with their father being the boss. The extended family structure allows Muslims to collaborate on many decisions, even though this is seen at TSI when decisions are made, only a restricted group of people would be welcomed in the discussion, often based on previously formed relationships rather than bringing in expertise. Closed meetings were kept quiet and communication was poor, probably to avoid upsetting other members of staff that were being excluded. Consequently decisions were made, rules and regulations formalised and often staff could not guess where these decisions were being made or why.
The non-Muslim staff often felt respected when meeting Muslim students, officers and lecturers, greetings could go on for 5-10 minutes.
O’Neill’s (1994, p.107) four independent elements of organisational activities are related to TSI in the following way.
Purpose – Those official educational purposes of the organisation laid down by the mission statement have not been realised in practice, students are coming back once training is complete with a very academic background from universities, but little practical ability to operate and maintain the various equipment of the armed forces. These students return to join the ranks and share similar roles with the current officers in TSI.
Many lecturers hoped to see a change in TSI over the years as this educated cohort begin replacing their relatively poorly trained officers and start making effective decisions to improve the structure of TSI, hoping job security becomes related to ability rather than relationships with senior officers.
Symbolism – western staff are well respected, but at the same time through management structures and styles, ceremonies and rituals, they are implicitly reminded they are not part of the whole process at TSI. Some staff regard themselves as specialist experts given a unique status, other staff feel that they are ignored and just regarded as the hired help.
Networks – People meet and greet each other very well, this seems to be the custom from Islamic teachings, working together is a little harder to achieve possibly due to the lack of reward (apart from financial), with many players attempting to keep their positional authority, keeping contacts in higher positions of authority impressed with their abilities. Officers in turn take more and more advice from these players, influencing superiors to get certain jobs done depending on personal agendas. Communication seems to be restricted, maybe not only to prevent awareness in talented subordinates, but also maybe to highlight incompetence when it only exists due to a lack of information. Arabic culture is seen to avoid conflict, and if told by a trusted colleague of the incompetence of a member of staff, he will listen, but rarely confront the member of staff to get to the truth. Staff feel uncomfortable with this, as they rarely know what is being said about them, or for what reason, and then are often guessing why their contract for employment has not been renewed.
Integration – Different groups of people are rarely brought together, this only seems to emphasize the sub-cultures that exist in TSI, all foreign lecturers felt (statement 57) that there should be more team building exercises / social interactions between military officers and academic staff. Part of this I suspect is to network with relatively higher ranking officers, and part of this is to genuinely eradicate the small amount of suspicion that exists between lecturers themselves at the same time bringing officers together with staff creating a shared understanding of negotiated norms and meanings as said by Nias et al. (1989, p.39).
CONCLUSION.
The current management style noticed at the Technical Studies Institute seems to be similar in nature to Bush (1995, p.147) formal or bureaucratic theory of educational management. There is definitely a hierarchical authority structure with the commander at the top making decisions and policies, and being answerable to military headquarters / government. There are many rules and regulations in place, innovation and initiative are perceived to be discouraged or at best not rewarded. There is a division of labour based on expertise, and the professional lecturers with their expert knowledge often come into conflict with the positional authority of UAE national officers, who don’t hold the same level of expertise when it came to management or educational issues.
As one would expect in a military establishment, the management style is more formal / bureaucratic in nature, in order to understand why there were so many weaknesses in the management structure, our first port of call must be the commander. Unfortunately, examples of an inspiring, innovative visionary leader were not noticed by the lecturers.
The organisational culture according to deal O’Neil (1994, p.105) is enacted in several ways, the main features at TSI were:
- The shared values and beliefs in written form could be seen in the mission statement, which surprisingly was not widely known by lecturers.
- Heroes in the workplace were those that primarily made good relationships with officers colleagues and students.
- Rituals and ceremonies were noticed but didn’t really involve the foreign staff, the main event was that of the graduation parade that happened once a year. Crests, motifs and uniforms were ideas originating from the British Army. On the surface parallels could be drawn between the two Armies, but the underlying culture was Islamic at the TSI.
- Communication of information was on a need to know basis, discouraging insight and innovation. This in itself encouraged lecturers to work individually. Successful practice became a very personal goal, rather than institutionally enforced.
- An informal network of cultural players were very visible by lecturers who often would get frustrated with their existence, these players (officers, western academic advisors and section supervisors) were keeping hold of their positional authority as well as they could, to the detriment of efficient and effective running of the institution. They could never be seen to have innovative and dynamic subordinates, for fear of losing their own role, position or more importantly respect and influence in front of their own supervisors.
Recommendations for further study – this has turned out to be a large topic, and TSI could be a great centre of education. To improve the institution as a whole it would be nice to turn this into a case study, presenting findings from this investigation to the commander and then try to implement structural changes especially related to communication, eradicating unnecessary chains of command and introducing staff development for both lecturers and officers. It would be interesting to see whether TSI could carry out the seemingly impossible task of keeping the good points of its current culture, at the same time adopt a more effective and efficient style of management, even with its long established ‘Arab’ way of doing things.
Hopkins (1996, p.37) states how changing the structure of the organisation could have an impact on the culture:
Significant structural changes, especially ones that bring teachers into working more closely together, will affect how teachers talk to one another and define their professional relationships. It is through the new relationships and the content and style of talk arising from structural changes that the culture begins to shift.
Appendices
Appendix A: Results of staff survey.
ORGANISING.
LEADING.
CONTROLLING.
Appendix B: Questionnaire used.
ORGANISING.
LEADING.
CONTROLLING.
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