Is There a Possibility to Characterize an Organizational Culture by Its Selected Cultural Dimensions?

Abstract

Many dimensional models of organizational cultures were developed decades ago, thus, in very different contexts. The world has become more complex, and such complexity can be identified in many aspects of everyday life, including working spheres. The objective of the study is to identify the changes in the perception of the complexity of characteristics of organizational cultures. Research is based on the Nine Factors Methodology aimed at the analysis of the motivational potential of organizational cultures and, based on the results, the analysis of the differences between/among selected subcultures. In the study, bivariant correlation analysis and factorial analysis with PCA extraction are used. The results show that the number of factors (dimensions) has lowered through the decades. While in 1999, nine factors of organizational culture were used to characterize it, in 2007, there were seven factors, and in 2017, only four factors which assumably led to the increase in their complexity. Even though the importance of existing dimensional models cannot be underestimated at present, the study indicates that the complexity of organizations and their organizational cultures results in more complex and interconnected individual dimensions than suggested initially. According to the study, when analyzing organizational cultures, a wider context must be considered, including relations between and among their dimensions because atomizing culture into individual dimensions provides an incomplete picture of the culture in question. At the same time, it is necessary to look at the organizations as heterogeneous units, which include several possible subcultures.