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The Elephant and the Stork: Organizational Cultures 353

this profession. Those who successfully completed the training felt quickly
at home in the department. Toward clients the employees demonstrated
a problem-solving attitude: they showed considerable excitement about
original ways in which to resolve customers’ problems, ways in which some
rules could be stretched in order to achieve the desired result. Promotion
was from the ranks and was felt to go to the most competent and support-
ive colleagues.

It is not unlikely that this department benefited from a certain “Haw-
16
thorne effect” because of the key role it had played in a successful turn-
around. At the time of the interviews, the euphoria of the successful
turnaround was prob ably at its peak. Observers inside the company com-
mented that people’s values had not really changed but that the turnaround
had transformed a discipline of obedience toward superiors into a discipline
of service toward customers.

Results of the Survey: Six Dimensions of
Organizational Cultures

The IBM studies had resulted in the identification of four dimensions of
national cultures (power distance, individualism-collectivism, masculinity-
femininity, and uncertainty avoidance). These were dimensions of values,
because the national IBM subsidiaries primarily differed on the cultural
values of their employees. The twenty units studied in the IRIC cross-orga-
nizational study, however, differed only slightly with respect to the cultural
values of their members, but they varied considerably in their practices.
Most questions in the paper-and-pencil survey measured people’s per-
ceptions of the practices in their work unit. These were presented in a “Where
I work . . .” format; for example:

WHERE I WORK:
Meeting times are Meeting times are
kept very punctually 1 2 3 4 5 only kept approximately
Quantity prevails Quality prevails
over quality 1 2 3 4 5 over quantity

Each item thus consisted of two opposite statements: which statement was
put in the right column and which in the left column was decided on a ran-
dom basis, so that their position could not suggest their desirability.