Page 392 - Cultures and Organizations

The Elephant and the Stork: Organizational Cultures 357

ior at home as well as on the job; they felt that in hiring employees, the
company took their social and family background into account as much as
their job competence; and they did not look far into the future (they prob-
ably assumed the organization would do this for them). On the other side,
members of professional cultures considered their private lives their own
business, they felt the organization hired on the basis of job competence
only, and they did think far ahead. U.S. sociologist Robert Merton has
called this distinction local versus cosmopolitan, the contrast between an
20
internal and an external frame of reference. The parochial type of culture
is often associated with Japanese companies. Predictably in the IRIC sur-
vey, unit scores on this dimension were correlated with the unit members’
level of education: parochial units tended to have employees with less for-
mal education. SAS passenger terminal employees scored quite parochial
(24); HGBV employees scored about halfway (48).
Dimension 4 opposes open systems to closed systems. The key items show
that in the open system units, members considered both the organization
and its people open to newcomers and outsiders; almost anyone would fi t
into the organization, and new employees needed only a few days to feel at
home. In the closed system units, the organization and its people were felt
to be closed and secretive, even among insiders; only very special people

fitted into the organization, and new employees needed more than a year to
feel at home (in the most closed unit, one member of the managing board
confessed that he still felt like an outsider after twenty-two years). On this
dimension, HGBV again scored halfway (51) and SAS extremely open (9).
What this dimension describes is the communication climate. It was the
only one of the six “practices” dimensions associated with nationality: it
seemed that an open organization al communication climate was a charac-
teristic of Denmark more than of the Netherlands. However, one Danish

organization scored very closed.
Dimension 5 refers to the amount of internal structuring in the orga-
nization. According to the key questions, people in loose control units felt
that no one thought of cost, meeting times were only kept approximately,
and jokes about the company and the job were frequent. People in tight
control units described their work environment as cost-conscious, meet-
ing times were kept punctually, and jokes about the company and/or the
job were rare. It appears from the data that a tight formal control system
is associated, at least statistically, with strict unwritten codes in terms
of dress and dignified behavior. On a scale where 0 equals loose and 100