Page 390 - Cultures and Organizations

The Elephant and the Stork: Organizational Cultures 355

puted for each country on each cross-national dimension. The unit scores
of the three questions chosen were strongly correlated with each other. 17
Their content was such that together they would convey the essence of the
dimension, as the researchers saw it, to the managers and the employees
of the units in the feedback sessions.
Dimension 1 opposes a concern with means (process oriented) to a con-
cern with goals (results oriented). The three key items show that in the
process-oriented cultures, people perceived themselves as avoiding risks
and spending only a limited effort in their jobs, while each day was pretty
much the same. In the results-oriented cultures, people perceived them-
selves as comfortable in unfamiliar situations and as putting in a maximal
effort, while each day was felt to bring new challenges. On a scale from
0 to 100, in which 0 represents the most process-oriented unit and 100
the most results-oriented unit among the twenty, HGBV, the chemical
plant described earlier, scored 2 (very process oriented, little concern for
results), while the SAS passenger terminal scored 100: it was the most

results-oriented unit of all. For this dimension it is difficult not to attach a
“good” label to the results- oriented pole and a “bad” label to the other side.
Nevertheless, there are operations for which a single-minded focus on the
process is essential. The most process-oriented unit (score 0) was a produc-

tion unit in a pharmaceutical firm. Drug manufacturing is an example of a
risk-avoiding, routine-based environment in which it is doubtful whether
one would want its culture to be results oriented. Similar concerns exist
in many other organizational units. So, even a results orientation is not
always “good” and its opposite not always “bad.”
One of the main claims from Peters and Waterman’s book In Search of
Excellence was that “strong” cultures are more effective than “weak” ones.
A problem in verifying this proposition was that in the corporate culture
literature one would search in vain for a practical (operational) measure of

culture strength. As the issue seemed important, the IRIC project devel-
oped a method for measuring the strength of a culture. A strong culture
was interpreted as a homogeneous culture—that is, one in which all survey
respondents gave about the same answers on the key questions, regardless
of the content of the questions. A weak culture was a heterogeneous one:
this type was evidenced when answers among people in the same unit var-
ied widely. The survey data showed that across the twenty units studied,
culture strength (homogeneity) was significantly correlated with results