Culture and Values

Each archetype requires a particular type of culture, which supports the organization and enables it to thrive (or at least survive and compete) in its market.  This culture is made up of four fundamental aspects:

• the general organizational climate  (and the professional relationships that characterize it)
• the organization's structure (and the key attributes of that structure)
• the primary focus of leadership (and the tools used to exercise that leadership)
• the organization's core values

The chart below presents the essential aspects of climate, structure, and leadership for each archetype:

Rulers need compliance - and a bureaucracy to ensure it - so that strategy can be deployed easily from the top.  The organization should consist of layers of managers whose primary interest is directing the people below them, as specified by strategy.  Leaders should use their power to motivate managers and employees to support that strategy.  All of these attributes support the market-dominating behavior expected in (and needed by) a ruler company. 

Such behavior, and the bureaucratic structures that support it, have gotten a great deal of bad press in recent years.  Yet these are precisely what enable a ruler organization to survive, thrive, and dominate its market.  While such an arrangement may not result in high worker satisfaction, most of the people employed by a ruler organization expect to have to deal with these attributes, and learn to work with them as best they can.  Indeed, people who can tolerate dominant and sometimes erratic managerial control may actually feel quite satisfied working in this kind of company. 

Warriors need to act in a unified manner across large spans of geography.  It is expected that a warrior organization will act very aggressively to capture each available point of distribution or shelf space.  To achieve this goal, its structure needs to be designed for strength of direction, with little or no deviation, so that huge strategies are precisely implemented through the proper execution of orders.  People who are personally aggressive thus tend to be happiest in warrior organizations.

Hunter organizations exist in a survival-of-the-fittest environment, where each accomplishment is an important contribution to the continued life of the company.  Leaders must capture the minds of managers and employees by allowing them to help create - and fully understand - the strategy, so that it guides behavior without aggressive managerial control.  People who are relationship-oriented, and who like making decisions and taking direct action, tend to be successful in this environment.

Pioneers have a voracious appetite to develop products, services, and markets.  The structure of a pioneer organization needs to be very flexible in order to allow for rapid change and movement.  Leaders need to concentrate on developing the resources needed to support development.  These resources typically include people, money, equipment, access to raw materials, and information.  People who enjoy newness, innovation, personal challenge, and intense environments tend to do well here.

As for values, they are one of the most crucial aspects of organizational life.  Clearly, the organizational values that best support a company's activities differ significantly from one archetype to the other.  These values, in turn, create some common organizational attributes.  

Here is what these look like for each archetype:

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