Organizational Culture and Management Cynicism: How Different Cultural Profiles Affect Cynical Views on Managers

Abstract

Cynicism within the organizational context has been gaining ground in the last few decades due to massive changes in how business enterprises are run. Cynicism, from the organizational perspective, refers to a multi-faceted attitude characterized by negative feelings such as distrust, frustration and contempt toward the policies and practices of organization itself. In many cases, organizational cynicism reveals itself among employees as cynical attitudes toward managers. Such type of organizational cynicism is known as management cynicism. Although there are numerous organizational and individual causes lying behind management cynicism, this study focuses on how different organizational culture profiles affect management cynicism. In this study, four-quadrant organizational culture framework developed by Cameron and Freeman (1991) was adopted to illustrate if different cultural profiles and values attributed to them have significant impact on management cynicism. This paper examines the relations between different organizational culture profiles and management cynicism based on data collected from shop floor employees of four leading vendor companies for big-sized domestic appliance manufacturers.