Page 391 - Cultures and Organizations

356 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

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orientation. To the extent that results oriented stands for effective, Peters
and Waterman’s proposition about the effectiveness of strong cultures was
therefore confi rmed.
Dimension 2 opposes a concern for people (employee oriented) to a con-
cern for completing the job (job oriented). The key items selected show that
in the employee-oriented cultures, people felt that their personal problems
were taken into account, that the organization took a responsibility for
employee welfare, and that important decisions were made by groups or
committees. In the job-oriented units, people experienced strong pressure
to complete the job; they perceived the organization as interested only in
the work employees did, not in their personal and family welfare; and they
reported that important decisions were made by individuals. On a scale
from 0 to 100, HGBV scored 100 and the SAS passenger terminal 95—both
of them extremely employee oriented. Scores on this dimension refl ected
the philosophy of the unit or company’s founder(s), but they refl ected as
well the possible scars left by past events: units that had recently been in
economic trouble, especially if this had been accompanied by collective lay-
offs, tended to score job oriented, even if according to informants the past
had been different. Opinions about the desirability of a strong employee
orientation differed among the leaders of the units in the study. In the
feedback discussions some top managers wanted their unit to become more
employee oriented, but others desired a move in the opposite direction.
The employee-oriented versus job-oriented dimension corresponds to
the two axes of a classic U.S. leadership model: Robert Blake and Jane
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Mouton’s managerial grid. Blake and Mouton developed an extensive sys-
tem of leadership training on the basis of their model. In this training,
employee orientation and job orientation are treated as two independent
dimensions: a person can be high on both, on one, or on neither. This
treatment seems to be in conflict with our placing of the two orientations

at opposite poles of a single dimension. However, Blake and Mouton’s grid
applies to individuals, while the IRIC study compared organizational units.
What the IRIC study shows is that while individuals may well be both job
oriented and employee oriented at the same time, organizational cultures
tend to favor one or the other.
Dimension 3 opposes units whose employees derive their identity
largely from the organization (parochial) to units in which people identify
with their type of job (professional). The key questions show that members
of parochial cultures felt that the organization’s norms covered their behav-