Bureaucratic Culture

Bureaucratic culture is one where hierarchy is everything and strict rules are applied. Bureaucratic culture focuses on stability and predictability.

Here are some characteristics of a bureaucratic culture.

Clear Hierarchy: In a Bureaucratic culture, the organization flows into departments with a clear hierarchy from top to bottom. Each department contains people specialized in doing specific tasks.

Solid Communication: Information flow is limited. Usually, a few people at the top of the hierarchy control all the information.  Only formal communication is allowed between employees.

Rules are Everything: The bureaucratic culture emphasizes adherence to rules. This prevents employees from taking bold steps and trying something new, resulting in a lack of innovation.

Lack of Shared Responsibility: Like pathological culture, employees also lack a sense of shared responsibility in bureaucratic culture. But unlike pathological culture fingers are only pointed to improve the culture by implementing more rules. 

This type of culture is also harmful to DevOps. In the software development process, cross-communication between teams is crucial to prevent bottlenecks in the delivery process. But bureaucratic culture discourages cross-communication.

The software development process moves at a fast pace. Organizations must be able to adapt to changing customer needs, but bureaucratic culture practices prevent any change.

For stability and predictability, a bureaucratic culture discourages any change. But when change does happen, it happens at a larger scale to prevent many instances of downtime. DevOps, on the other hand, emphasizes continuous integration practices, which means various code changes are made every day.