Page 383 - Cultures and Organizations

348 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

Most of the present chapter is based on the results of a research project
carried out between 1985 and 1987 under the auspices of the Institute for
Research on Intercultural Cooperation (IRIC). It used the cross-national
IBM studies as a model. Paradoxically, these studies had not provided
direct information about IBM’s corporate culture, as all units studied were
from the same corporation, and there were no outside points of comparison.
As a complement to the cross-national study, the IRIC study was cross-
organizational: instead of one corporation in a number of countries, it cov-
ered a number of different organizations in two countries, Denmark and
the Netherlands.
The IRIC study found the roles of values versus practices at the orga-
nizational level to be exactly the opposite of their roles at the national level.
Comparing otherwise similar people in different organizations showed con-
siderable differences in practices but much smaller differences in values.
At that time, the popular literature on corporate cultures, following
Peters and Waterman, insisted that shared values represented the core
of a corporate culture. The IRIC project showed that shared perceptions of
daily practices should be considered the core of an organization’s culture.
Employees’ values differed more according to their gender, age, and educa-
tion (and, of course, their nationality) than according to their membership
in the organization per se.

The difference between IRIC’s findings and the statements by Peters
and Waterman and their followers can be explained by the fact that the
U.S. management literature tends to describe the values of corporate

heroes (founders and significant leaders), whereas IRIC asked the ordinary
members who are supposed to carry the culture. IRIC assessed to what
extent leaders’ messages had come across to members. Without doubt, the
values of founders and key leaders shape organizational cultures, but the

way these cultures affect ordinary members is through shared practices.
Founders’ and leaders’ values become members’ practices.
Effective shared practices are the reason that multinational corpora-
tions can function at all. Employing personnel from a variety of nation-
alities, they cannot assume common values. They coordinate and control
their operations through worldwide practices that are inspired by their
national origin (be it U.S., Japanese, German, Dutch, etc.) but that can be
learned by employees from a variety of other national origins. 13
If members’ values depend primarily on criteria other than member-
ship in the organization, the way these values enter the organization is