Meta-analysis and the Culture-free Hypothesis

Abstract

This paper employs meta-analysis to evaluate the relationships between size and three dimensions of organizational structure. The purpose was to synthesize and integrate existing knowledge pertaining to the 'culture-free' hypothesis by analyzing the results of 27 previously published studies, which provided a total sample of 1066 organizations from 11 different countries. The results show that size is significantly related to both specialization and formalization, but that the relationship between size and centraliza tion is not significantly different from zero. The effects of type of organization and type of country upon these relationships were inconsequential. The findings imply that the development of a general theory of organizational structure need not be hampered by current preoccupations with minor differences across studies.