One manifestation of this was a generally high ratio of grievances to workers. This caused great consternation to the management since they were strangely unable to apprehend the characters and regarded the disruptions as heretical in relation to their view of how workers should behave. This continued for many months. By 1985, the population of the Anderson complex was down to around 10,000 workers and programs initiated by the organizational development department had produced some an awareness in the management that the people side of the business is as important in many ways as the technical side. Noel Tichy makes this point about culture in his book, Managing Strategic Change .
Organizations are in part held together by a normative glue that is called culture.
Culture consists of the values, objectives, beliefs and interpretations shared by organizational members. One of the most important and most difficult tasks of top management is to decide the content of the organization's culture, that is, to determine what values should be shared, what objectives are worth striving for, what beliefs the employees should be committed to and what interpretations of past events and current pronouncements would be most beneficial for the firm. However, the Tayloristic principles practiced for decades in the older plants had left their mark on the culture. Many managers were woefully unaware of their lack of understanding of modern management techniques. They found themselves accepting the mind-set of their superiors and they tended to autocratically manage those below.