The impact of the EU accession process to the organizational culture of the companies operating in the transition countries

Abstract

The aim of this research is to reveal the direction of change the cultural dimensions of companies in AP Vojvodina, when the Republic of Serbia – as a country in transition – was being included in the European division of labor. Foreign direct investments from EU countries are used as a method of transposing cultural patterns. The research methodology used here included the application of the Mann Whitney and the Chi square tests to compare the attitudes of the managers of these two groups of companies in AP Vojvodina. The results indicate that there is no statistically significant difference in the attitudes of managers of the two groups of companies, in terms of the questionnaire items that explore the power distance dimension. In AP Vojvodina, masculinity and individualism are still valued to a greater extent by the managers of companies with foreign capital than by those with domestic capital. Managers of the companies with foreign capital show a higher degree of uncertainty avoidance than those with domestic capital, which is contrary to authors’ expectations, though explicable in the context of the recessionary business conditions under which the research was conducted.

Keywords

• Organizational culture
• competitiveness
• transition countries