Page 397 - Cultures and Organizations

362 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

ranks. Finally, in results-oriented units, union membership among employ-
ees tended to be lower.
The strongest correlations with dimension 2 (employee orientation
versus job orientation) were with the way the unit was controlled by the
organization to which it belonged. Where the top manager of the unit
stated that his superiors evaluated him on profi ts and other fi nancial per-
formance measures, the members scored the unit culture as job oriented.
Where the top manager of the unit felt that his superiors evaluated him on
performance versus a budget, the opposite was the case: members scored
the unit culture to be employee oriented. It seems that operating against

external standards (profits in a market) breeds a less benevolent culture
than operating against internal standards (a budget). Where the top
manager stated that he allowed contro versial news to be published in the
employee newsletter, members felt the unit to be more employee oriented,
which validated the top manager’s veracity.
The remaining correlations of employee orientation were with the aver-
age seniority (years with the company) and age of employees (more senior
employees scored a more job-oriented culture), with the education level of
the top-management team (less-educated teams correspond with a more
job-oriented culture), and with the total invested capital (surprisingly, not
with the invested capital per employee). Large organizations with heavy
investment tended to be more employee oriented than job oriented.
On dimension 3 (parochial versus professional), units with a traditional
technology tended to score parochial and high-tech units professional.
The strongest correlations of this dimension were with various measures
of size: it was not unexpected that the larger organizations fostered the
more professional cultures. Also as could be expected, professional cultures
had less labor union membership. Their managers had a higher average

education level and age. Their organizational structures showed more spe-
cialization. An interesting correlation was with the time budget of the unit
top manager, by which is meant the way the unit top manager claimed to
spend his time. In the units with a professional culture, the top managers
claimed to spend a relatively large share of their time in meetings and
person-to-person discussions. Finally, the privately owned units tended to
score more professional than the public ones.
Dimension 4 (open versus closed system) was responsible for the single
strongest correlation with external data: between the percentage of women
among the employees and the openness of the communication climate. 23