Examining organizational culture and decision making may allow for better financial decisions

Citation

Walther, J.H. (2001), "Examining organizational culture and decision making may allow for better financial decisions", The Bottom Line, Vol. 14 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/bl.2001.17014daa.001

Examining organizational culture and decision making may allow for better financial decisions

Examining organizational culture and decision making may allow for better financial decisions

While reviewing submissions for this issue, I was struck by the connections and associations that could be made between the articles, not for the expected financial, monetary, or budgetary advice commonly found in the Journal, but for the connections in the importance of decision making within our libraries. Each of the articles you will find in this Issue speaks of how money is used in libraries, specifically how financial decisions are part of a greater collection of decisions made in libraries to ensure effective collection development, systems implementations and integrations, innovative reference services – and the list continues. By temporarily stepping away from the practical aspects of library finance, we can find that the theoretical underpinnings of the organizational issues are often connected to effectively financing library functions and services.

To examine the broad question of how difficult financial decisions are made in libraries and information centers, I looked at how within the organizational science literature decision making is placed into context in any decision-making activity. What may inform us most may be our own institutional ability to make decisions as an organization for the individuals who use our organizations, namely begging the question, how financially smart is your library's organizational culture and decision making?

Organizational research has most recently given a close examination to corporate culture, as explained by:

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  cultural artifacts;

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  cultural history;

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  core ideology; and

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  core values (Fairfield-Sonn, 2001).

The benefits of this research to libraries as organizations is that we can gain a better understanding of how our libraries truly view "themselves". Unique to point out is Fairfield-Sonn's first issue of cultural artifacts. In libraries, these are our facilities, official documents, the Library Bill of Rights, and organizational chart, yet everyone working in a library also has an intrinsic knowledge that there is always another layer of getting things accomplished in the library. This is at the essence of the cultural artifact, and thereby a cultural attribute of the organization. You must learn what makes your library tick and how the work gets accomplished to be productive in the library world today. One place to examine culture and decision making would be in the area of financing libraries. Closely examining how things are accomplished financially in the library may be a telling sign of other organizational issues.

Lesson one. Organizational culture: what is the best first step in dealing with decision-making structures in your library?

Learn your organizational composition. What is just beyond the organizational chart? Is performance as a team in your library's culture just as important as your individual performance? How are the important decisions made – in committees or meetings? Or are these decisions even perceived any differently from decisions that are made each and every day in your library?

Next, culture goes beyond the structural issues of an organization and mandates a personal commitment to procuring and securing relevant information to do one's job (St Clair, 1994). In several libraries with and in which I have worked, finding the answer to your own organizational questions was the job of the librarian. Finding the best solution to one's own problems often was expected of librarians as a way to show the organization that they had hired the right person for the job. Hence goes the terminology for such situations: a problem solver, someone who can think on their feet, and so on. Using what one discovers about the financial expenditures of the library and how one can be more financially responsible on behalf of the organization is an important discovery for librarians to make.

Lesson two. Culture and information services: what does money mean to your library's decision-making process?

All of these processes, elements, organizational culture assessments, should lead back to one thing: productive use of finances for patron services. Specific library examples may include:

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  meeting client needs (special and corporate libraries);

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  developing lifelong readers (school libraries);

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  creating and enhancing a scholar's ability to further the body of knowledge (academic libraries); and

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  accomplishing taxpayer expectations for recreational reading and general interest research (public libraries).

Although all of this may sound like a mysterious matrix of how to make decisions in today's libraries, a recent Harvard Business Review (HBR) article examined business decision making, beyond models and matrixes, and looked at how managers actually made tough decisions. Overwhelmingly, the findings were their guts. Executives from car companies, energy corporations and others, all agreed that intuition gave them the tools to make the right decision, namely an "aha!" sensation that you knew what the answer to your troubling question was all along (Hayashi, 2001). How can our decision making be so predictable or feel so familiar? The HBR study pointed out one finding of Herbert A. Simon, the Nobel laureate on the topic, who demonstrated that decision making has shown how people group information together. Unlike some professions, librarians have the training to take raw data, change them into information and use it for our own knowledge. From this knowledge, we can then make decisions. Therefore, as a group, we should have a hands up on decision making by our occupational training. Our information systems and organizational procedures are designed to assist in our decision-making processes.

Lesson three. Trust what you already know is the right decision for the library: how can you best direct the decision-making process for your library?

Know on what you are needed to decide. Are all of our decisions money decisions? Think of some quick examples of what librarians must decide during a given day? We act upon such decisions as collection development allocations, technology upgrades, consortia memberships, journal cancellations and subscription purchases. From an organizational context, libraries have several, seemingly invisible, cost-intensive services such as preservation services, cataloging, shelving, interlibrary loan, security, etc., each of which is decision laden. Once one steps back from ones organizational efforts, libraries spend considerable amounts in dollars, and in decisions. Hopefully, by thinking about your patrons and organizational contexts first, you can then make wise and fiscally sound decisions for them.

James H. WaltherBryan Cave, LLP, Washington, DCEditor

References

Fairfield-Sonn, J.W. (2001), Corporate Culture and the Quality Organization, Greenwood, Westport, CT.

Hayashi, A.M. (2001), "When to trust your gut", Harvard Business Review, Vol. 79 No. 2, pp. 59-65.

St Clair, G. (1994), Power and Influence: Enhancing Information Services within the Organization, Bowker-Saur, East Grinstead.