Adopting a grounded theory approach for managing corporate culture change

Abstract

Since cultural change can be easily conceptualised as a social process, it is intuitively logical to use the grounded theory (GT) methodology to study organisational culture change. Providing a model of organisational culture change management in the National Petrochemical Company (NPC) was the purpose of the present study. This company is a large corporation which was split into smaller separate corporations. It is managed under new vision, mission, and leadership. The concepts and categories, in open coding, were obtained by breaking up the data collected from five employees. Then, in axial coding, they shaped the paradigm model in which the phenomenon is managing corporate cultural change. The components of the desired culture as the result of the model were innovation, humanism, goal orientation, and social responsibility. Finally, five theories of the core category that aggregates all categories were presented in selective coding.