Abstract
The objective of the paper is to diagnose organisational culture of selected universities and analyse its impact on the innovation processes within them. The subject matter of the study was organisational culture and innovation at universities. The subjects were four selected universities in Poland, Austria, Germany, and Ukraine. The paper provided a definition of organisational culture and its typology. It further discussed the organisational culture of universities and the relationships between organisational culture and innovativeness. The literature review provided foundations for building a model for the formation of a type of organisational culture at universities that is innovation-friendly, which is the added value of the paper. It offers actions worth taking to shape innovation-friendly culture at universities. It is particularly important during difficult time of changing labour market, when universities greatly impact the attitudes of young people. The knowledge of how to shape innovation-friendly organisational culture at universities is necessary for academia to profile future employees in times of continuous changes. To investigate the relationship between organisational culture and the innovativeness of universities, we designed an original survey questionnaire [S1 File]. Organisational culture was diagnosed with the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument by K.S. Cameron and R.E. Quinn. The analyses were conducted in Dell Statistica v. 13.1 (StatSoft Polska). We normalised data from the Likert rating scale using Kaufman’s and Rousseeuw’s formula. We used Spearman’s correlation coefficient and Kendall’s W to calculate correlations. The research shows that the investigated Polish and Austrian universities are dominated by hierarchy and market cultures. On the other hand, the German and Ukrainian universities host all cultures, but clan and adhocracy dominate there. Moreover, the analyses demonstrated that although the adhocracy culture was the least visible in the investigated organisations, it contributes to university innovativeness the most. The conclusions were used to build a model for promoting innovation-friendly organisational culture at universities. The model contains answers to the research questions. In addition, it offers guidelines for shaping organisational culture to bolster innovation at universities. The research identified relationships between organisational culture and university innovativeness and components that create innovation opportunities at universities as its contribution to management theory. When applied in practice, the guidelines can help form the university’s organisational culture bottom-up.
Highlights
Culture is an important problem in management, which remains open and ambiguous both in theory and practice
A significant share of the respondents in each university indicated that organisational culture impacts university innovativeness
Chi-square independence tests indicated that respondents’ opinions on whether or not organisational culture affected university innovativeness and formalisation or whether hierarchy hindered the establishment of innovation-oriented culture depended on the university from which the respondents were
Summary
Culture is an important problem in management, which remains open and ambiguous both in theory and practice. Cultural processes within organisations have been investigated by management sciences for decades. It is related to the societal impact on work processes (stemming from social relationships), on the other hand, cultural differentiation of societies and its impact on management have been studied since the 1970s [1]. Organisational culture has been discussed rather broadly in the literature of the last decades of the 20th century. Barney [3] and Slater and Olson, and Finnegan [4] explained that does organisational culture reflect who the employees, customers, suppliers, and competitors are, but it defines how the company will work with key stakeholders. The right organisational culture helps employees understand the business strategy, motivates, and nourishes interpersonal relationships
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