Aligning Culture Typologies to Innovative Employee Benefits: Using Cameron and Quinn's Competing Value Framework

Abstract

In recent years, major upheavals in the global business environment have paved way for an intensely competitive global marketplace. As such, competition to retain the most skilled and talented employee has grown and organizations use innovative and unconventional strategies to combat this situation. The unique attribute that differentiates successful companies all over the world is their unique organizational culture that helps in achieving organizational effectiveness and helps in retaining and attracting talented personnel. Therefore, HR practitioners nowadays are considering organization culture and innovative employee benefit as an important impetus of employee behavior. As Organization Culture and employee benefits are interrelated constituents of a broad organizational system framework that helps in achieving strategic goals of the organization, alignment and synchronization between the two is very important. When these two important variables of the organization system are not in congruence with each other they send conflicting signals that creates confusion in the minds of employees. This paper investigates the relationship between employee benefits and various organization culture typologies and suggests the best possible scenario for optimal performance. Based on Competing Values Framework which is the most detailed model that describes content and strength of organization culture. We have used various typologies viz. clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy and unconventional employee benefits like flexi-time, Employee referral scheme, Educational Benefit and Workplace recreation to put forth 4 propositions. More specifically, authors developed a theoretical framework which finds that clan culture emphasizes on flexi-time & educational benefits programs; adhocracy culture emphasizes on referral scheme & worksite recreational benefits, and market culture is positively associated with employee referral programs.