Measuring organic and mechanistic cultures
Saturday, December 1 2001
Abstract
HEADNOTEKnowledge workers in today's high-technology organizations require environments with organic characteristics. To retain highly skilled knowledge workers, managers need to determine whether their organizations exhibit organic or mechanistic cultures. Culture is an important factor in successful technology implementation, innovation, mergers, acquisitions, job satisfaction, organizational success, and team effectiveness. This article discusses organic and mechanistic organizational cultures and the organizational culture assessment (OCA) tool. The tool gives an organization's culture type and a numerical score for each of five culture elements. Survey results indicate that the OCA adequately measures organizational culture.
Introduction
Some of the challenges that make organizational culture significant today include downsizing, budget cuts, globalization, and the rapid rate of technological improvements. Kanter (1983) states that to manage change in an organization requires that people find their stability and security in the culture and direction of the organization.