MGMT 4400 Week 9 Organizational Culture Write-Up Example

Free Birthday Dessert at the Diner, Never at the Bistro: A Culture Write-Up Testing Martin's Integration, Differentiation and Fragmentation Perspectives on One Unplanned Custom

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Walden University

MGMT 4400: Organizational Behavior and Management

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Month Day, Year

Free Birthday Dessert at the Diner, Never at the Bistro: A Culture Write-Up Testing Martin's Integration, Differentiation and Fragmentation Perspectives on One Unplanned Custom

A Custom Nobody Created

Regulars at the original diner, the oldest of the four Brennan Family Kitchens restaurants in this course's composite case, get a free slice of pie on their birthdays. A server who notices the date, often from a conversation weeks earlier, tells the kitchen, and the pie arrives with a candle and the whole staff singing. It happens most weeks. At the group's newest location, the Overland Park bistro opened in March, it never happens, although many of its servers came from the diner and the owners are the same. No written policy creates the custom at the diner, no owner approved it, and pie for regulars appears nowhere in the budget; the diner's manager estimates it costs about $40 a week in pie. Because nobody planned it, the custom is a question about culture rather than policy.

Three Ways to See Culture

Martin (1992) argued that researchers see organizational culture through three perspectives. The integration perspective sees culture as shared values and assumptions held consistently across an organization. The differentiation perspective sees culture as divided into subcultures, each with its own shared meanings, which may conflict. The fragmentation perspective sees culture as ambiguous: meanings are unclear, inconsistent and constantly shifting, with no stable consensus. Each perspective notices different things, and Martin argued that a full account often needs more than one.

Why One Culture Cannot Explain It

The integration perspective would describe Brennan Family Kitchens as having a single culture, perhaps summed up by the owners' motto, "Treat every guest like family." If that culture were truly shared across the group, the birthday custom would appear at every location, or at least at the bistro, which was staffed partly from the diner. It does not. An integration reading cannot explain why the same company, the same owners and some of the same people produce the custom in one place and not another.

Two Subcultures

The differentiation perspective explains the contrast better. The diner, open since 1979, has a subculture built around regulars: many guests have come weekly for years, servers know their names and their children's names, and the kitchen staff have worked together for a decade. The bistro, open seven months, serves a younger, more transient clientele; most guests are first-time or occasional visitors, and the staff are still learning each other's names. Schein (2010) describes culture as what a group learns as it solves problems together over time, and the bistro's group has not yet had time to learn a custom that depends on knowing guests well. The servers who came from the diner brought the habit of noticing birthdays, but at the bistro there are few regulars whose birthdays they could know.

Where Fragmentation Adds Something

The fragmentation perspective adds one detail. Even at the diner, the custom is not uniform: some servers never mention birthdays, and the kitchen once refused to send pie on a Saturday night when it was overwhelmed. The custom persists through a loose, shifting set of individuals rather than a firm rule, which is exactly what fragmentation predicts. That fragility explains why it did not travel: a custom held loosely by some people in one place has no mechanism to transfer itself to another.

A Test of the Reading

The differentiation reading can be tested against what happens next. If the custom depends on knowing regulars, it should appear at the bistro once regulars appear, not before. The bistro's reservation system already flags guests who have visited five or more times; there are now about sixty such guests, compared with several hundred at the diner. If the reading is right, the first birthday desserts at the bistro should go to some of those sixty, probably served by staff who came from the diner. A server from the diner said as much when asked: "I'd do it if I knew anybody's birthday here." If, instead, the bistro continued to show no such custom even after its regulars grew, the explanation would need to look elsewhere, perhaps to the bistro's manager, who comes from a chain restaurant where comping desserts required a manager's approval and a written reason. That detail fits the integration view of a manager carrying a different set of assumptions, and the coming months could show which reading holds.

What the Owners Could Do

The owners face a choice. They could make the custom a policy at every location, which would make it consistent but might also change its meaning, turning a gesture of personal recognition into a procedure. Or they could encourage it to grow at the bistro as regulars accumulate, perhaps by asking servers who came from the diner to keep track of repeat guests. The differentiation reading suggests the second approach is more likely to produce the warmth the custom expresses, because that warmth depends on relationships the bistro is only beginning to form (Robbins & Judge, 2019).

Conclusion

The birthday dessert is not evidence of one company culture but of a subculture at one location, held loosely enough that it does not spread on its own. Martin's perspectives together explain both why the custom exists where it does and why it has not appeared at the bistro.

References

Martin, J. (1992). Cultures in organizations: Three perspectives. Oxford University Press.

Robbins, S. P., & Judge, T. A. (2019). Organizational behavior (18th ed.). Pearson.

Schein, E. H. (2010). Organizational culture and leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.