Page 384 - Cultures and Organizations

The Elephant and the Stork: Organizational Cultures 349

through the hiring process: a company hires people of a certain nationality,
gender, age, or education. Their subsequent socialization in the organiza-
tion is a matter of learning the practices: symbols, heroes, and rituals.
Two Dutch researchers, Joseph Soeters and Hein Schreuder, compared

employees in Dutch and foreign accounting firms operating in the Neth-
erlands. They found differences in values between the two groups, but
they could prove that these differences were based on self-selection by the
candidates, not on socialization to the firm’s values after entering. Human

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resources departments that preselect the people to be hired play an impor-
tant role in maintaining an organization’s values (for better or for worse), a
role of which HR managers—and their colleagues in other functions—are
not always conscious.

Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches
in the IRIC Project

The original design of the IRIC project had been to compare only organi-
zations within one country (the Netherlands), but fi nding suffi cient Dutch
participants willing to grant access and share in the project’s cost proved
too difficult. Generous help by a Danish consultant resulted in adding a

number of Danish units. Thus, the final project was carried out on twenty

units representing ten different organizations: five in Denmark, five in the

Netherlands. On the IBM national culture dimensions, these two countries
scored fairly similar: both belong to the same Nordic-Dutch cluster. Within
these national contexts IRIC sought access to a wide range of work organi-
zations. By seeing how different organization cultures can be, one acquires
a better insight into how different is different and how similar is similar.
Units of study were both entire organizations and parts of organizations
that their management assumed to be culturally reasonably homogeneous

(the research outcome later allowed for testing of this assumption).
Table 10.1 lists the activities in which the twenty units were engaged.
Unit sizes varied from 60 to 2,500 persons. The number of units was small
enough to allow studying each unit in depth, qualitatively, as a separate
case study. At the same time, it was large enough to permit statistical
analysis of comparative quantitative data across all cases.
The first, qualitative phase of the study consisted of in-depth person-

to- person interviews of two to three hours duration each with nine infor-
mants per unit (thus a total of 180 interviews). These interviews yielded