Page 394 - Cultures and Organizations

The Elephant and the Stork: Organizational Cultures 359

their tasks. On dimension 6, service units and those operating in com-
petitive markets scored pragmatic; units involved in the implementation of
laws and those operating under a mono poly scored normative.
While the task and market environment thus affect the dimension
scores, the IRIC study, as noted, also produced its share of surprises: pro-
duction units with an unexpectedly strong results orientation even on the

shop floor, along with a unit such as HGBV with a loose control system
in relation to its task. These surprises represent the distinctive elements
in a unit’s culture (as compared with similar units) and the competitive
advantages or disadvantages of a particular organizational culture.
The other two dimensions, 2 and 4 (employee versus job and open
versus closed), seem to be less constrained by task and market but rather
based on historical factors such as the philosophy of the founder(s) and
recent crises. In the case of dimension 4, open versus closed system, the
national cultural environment was already shown to play a role as well.
Figure 10.1 indicates that although organizational cultures are mainly
composed of practices, they do have a modest values component. The
cross-organizational IRIC survey included the values questions from
the cross-national IBM studies. The organizations differed somewhat on
three clusters of values. The first resembled the cross-national dimension

of uncertainty avoidance, although the differences showed up on other sur-
vey questions than those used for computing the country UAI scores. The
cross-organizational uncertainty- avoidance measure was correlated with
dimension 4 (open versus closed), with weak uncertainty avoidance obvi-
ously on the side of an open communication climate. The relationship was
reinforced by the fact that the Danish units, with one exception, scored
more open than the Dutch ones. Denmark and the Netherlands, though
similar on most national culture scores, differed most on their national
uncertainty avoidance scores, Denmark scoring much lower.

A second cluster of cross-organizational values bore some resemblance
to power distance. It was correlated with dimension 1 (process oriented
versus results oriented): larger power distances were associated with pro-
cess orientation and smaller ones with results orientation.
Clusters of cross-organizational value differences associated with indi-
vidualism and masculinity were not found in the IRIC study. It is possible
that this was because the study was restricted to business organizations
and public institutions. If, for example, health and welfare organizations
had been included, the study might have shown a wider range of values