Page 399 - Cultures and Organizations

364 CULTURES IN ORGANIZATIONS

For dimension 6 (normative versus pragmatic), only one meaningful
correlation with external data was found. Privately owned units in the
sample were more pragmatic, public units (such as the police departments)
more normative.
Missing from the list of external data correlated with culture were
measures of the organizations’ performance. This does not mean that cul-
ture is not related to performance; it means only that the research did not

find comparable yardsticks for the performance of so varied a set of orga-
nizational units.
The relationships described in this section show objective conditions
of organizations that were associated with particular culture profi les. They
point to the things one has to change in order to modify an organiza-
tion’s culture—for example, certain aspects of its structure, or the priori-
ties of the top manager. We will come back to this theme at the end of the
chapter.

Organizational Subcultures

24
A follow-up study by IRIC investigated organizational subcultures. In
1988 a Danish insurance company commissioned IRIC to study the cul-
tures of all its departments, surveying its total population of 3,400 employ-
ees. The study used the same approach as the previous Danish-Dutch
project: open-ended interviews leading to the composition of a survey
questionnaire.
The total respondent population could be divided into 131 “organic”
working groups. These were the smallest building blocks of the organiza-
tion, whose members had regular face-to-face contact. Managers were not
included in the groups they managed but were combined with colleagues

at their level of the hierarchy.
On the basis of their survey answers, the 131 groups could be sorted
into three clearly distinct subcultures: a professional, an administrative, and
a customer interface subculture. The first included all managers and employ-

ees in tasks for which a higher education was normally required, the second
all the (mostly female) employees in clerical departments, and the third
two groups of employees dealing directly with customers: salespeople and
claim handlers.
Using the six dimensions from the Danish-Dutch study, the research-
ers showed various culture gaps among the three subcultures. The pro-