Comparison of Organizational Cultures from a Transitional Economy and a Knowledge Economy: Empirical Study from Serbia and Southern California

Abstract

In this paper the authors discuss organizational culture with focus on differences between characteristics oforganizational culture in traditional economy and knowledge economy. In the literature, knowledge economy isconsidered to be a platform on which Industry 4.0 is based. In the knowledge economy, knowledge is the keyresource while innovation capacity of employees is the key competitive advantage. That places people at thecentre of research relating to the success of organizations in the knowledge economy. People are carriers ofboth; the key resource – knowledge, and the key capacity - innovation.Human capital is usually divided intothree categories in scientific literature: ‘traditional’, ‘convertible’ and ‘creative’. Creative human capital impliesthe ability to set the tasks independently, the ability to switch between various activities, high professionalautonomy, continuing education, and knowledge sharing. Creative human capital is the accelerator oftransition from developing economy to knowledge economy. The importance of human capital and theaforementioned key characteristics of the knowledge economy, and its specific aspects relating to knowledgesharing and autonomy of knowledge workers, place the organizational culture at the centre of our research.The main research question in this paper is:Is it possible to identify and measure perception of organizational culture and its various dimensions in Serbiaand Southern California using Pareek’s OCTAPACE instrument?From the main research question the research hypothesis emerged. In order to answer the research questionand to support research hypothesis, the survey was conducted in which the organizations from Serbia wereconsidered to be from transitional economy, and organizations from Southern California were considered to bethe standard for the knowledge economy. This paper presents the results of survey conducted on a sample of383 executives and employees from organizations in Serbia and Southern California, using Pareek’sinstrument for the OCTAPACE model of organizational culture. Given that Industry 4.0 concept requirescontinuous innovation, education and knowledge sharing that not only depends on the people’s skills andattitudes, but also on organizational culture, results from this research should be useful to organizations intransitional economy as they attempt to keep pace with organizations from knowledge economies.