The Importance of Organisational Culture in a Multicultural Work Environment – a Preliminary Study

Abstract

Organisational culture has been studied by researchers for decades. Their avid interest in this issue is primarily related to its considerable impact on various areas of organisational life and on a company’s relations with its environment. The importance of organisational culture is of particular relevance in multicultural work environments, in which managers’ daily work consists in dealing with employees from various national cultures and with multicultural teams pursuing a company’s goals. Organisational culture is directed at eliminating organisational behavioural ambiguity and promoting employees’ pro-effective behaviours, which seems particularly pertinent in case of a culturally diverse workforce. In the theoretical part of the article, the Authors define the term organisational culture, discuss the functions of this culture, and present the Cameron and Quinn competing values model, while in the research part, they describe the methodology of the study, report the results of the interviews, and draw the conclusions. The Authors conducted the interviews analysed in the article with the Polish, Spanish and Portuguese managers in 2022. The analysis of both the literature and the results of the study allowed them to demonstrate the importance of organisational culture in contemporary management, especially in the context of managing people in multicultural work environments.

Keywords

• organisational culture
• multicultural work environment
• multicultural teams
• cultural differences
• managers