Legitimate Organizational Culture: A Comparative Study

Culture as a concept has had a long and checkered history. It has been used by the layperson as a word to indicate sophistication, as when we say that someone is very "cultured". It has been used by anthropologists to refer to the customs and rituals that societies develop over the course of their history. In the last decade or so it has been used by some organizational researchers and managers to indicate the climate and practices that organizations develop around their handling of people or to the espoused values and credo of an organization. In this context managers speak of developing the "right kind of culture" or a "culture of the quality", suggesting that culture is concerned with certain values that managers are trying to inculcate in their organizations. Also implied in this usage is the assumption that there are better or worse cultures, stronger or weaker cultures and that the right kind of the culture will influence how effective organizations are. Culture will be most useful, as a concept if it helps us better understand the hidden and complex aspects of organizational life. This understanding cannot be obtained if one use superficial definitions. Present Study: Since organizational culture is an important dimension to be considered for almost all aspect of the organization, the present project has taken up this issue for study and analyzing the focus between multinational and national organizations. It has been generally observed that the organizational culture and climate differ a great deal from one organization to another and this is seen more clearly in national and multinational organizations. Assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of organizational culture to helps an organization get an insight into the problem and thus try to attain maximum benefits. The comparison of multinationals with national organizations will help to understand the cultural attributes in a particular organizational set up. Organizational traits are divided into four major traits along with 12 sub components. These enable the organization to identify the weaknesses if any worked to overcome the same. Thus the main Objectives of the present study were as follows:  To examine the typical culture that exists in organizations.  To ascertain if this culture differs between multinational and national organizations.  To find out if there exists a difference in the sub-dimension of the overall culture of the organization viz, multinational and national organizations.  To ascertain if there is any association between the dimensions of organizational culture in regard to its twelve traits and whether there relationships vary between multinationals and national organizations. METHODLOGY Hypotheses: (1) There will be a significant difference between the multinational and national organization in regard to organizational culture. (2) There will be an association between organizational culture and its various dimensions. (3) The sub traits of organizational culture in national and multinational companies will differ. Sample: Two each, multinational and national organizations were selected for the present study. The nature of both type of organization was industrial manufacturing. The employees' strength of there underlying was almost same. The sample size of both national and multinational companies is 1400 of which 350 subjects each are from two national and two multinational companies.