Page 398 - Cultures and Organizations

The Elephant and the Stork: Organizational Cultures 363

The percentage of women among managers and the presence of at least one
woman in the top-management team were also correlated with openness.
However, this correlation was affected by the binational composition of
the research population. Among developed European countries, Denmark
at the time of the research had one of the highest participation rates of
women in the workforce, while the Netherlands had one of the lowest. Also,
as mentioned earlier, Danish units as a group (with one exception) scored
more open than Dutch units. This does not necessarily exclude a causal
relationship between the participation of women in the workforce and a
more open communication climate: it could very well be the explanation
as to why the Danish units were so much more open.
Also connected with the open versus closed dimension were the asso-
ciations of formalization with a more closed culture (a nice cross-validation
of both measures), of allowing controversial issues in the employee news-
letter with an open culture (obviously), and of higher average seniority
with a more open culture.
The strongest correlation of dimension 5 (loose versus tight control)
was with an item in the self-reported time budget of the unit top manager:
where the top manager claimed to spend a relatively large part of his time
reading and writing reports and memos from inside the organization, con-

trol was found to be tighter. This finding makes perfect sense. We also
found that material-intensive units have more tightly controlled cultures.
As the results of such units often depend on small margins of material
yields, this makes sense too.
Tight control was also correlated with the percentage of female man-
agers and of female employees, in that order. This was most likely a con-
sequence of the simple, repetitive, and clerical activities for which, in the
organizations studied, the larger numbers of women tended to be hired.

Tighter control was found in units with a lower education level among
male and female employees and also among its top managers. This reminds

us of the finding in Chapter 3 that employees in lower-educated occupa-
tions maintained larger power distances. In units in which the number of
employees had recently increased, control was felt to be looser; where the
number of employees had been reduced, control was perceived as tighter.
Employee layoffs are obviously associated with budget squeezes. Finally,
absenteeism among employees was lower where control was perceived to
be less tight. Absenteeism is evidently one way of escape from the pressure
of a tight control system.