Organizational Culture and the Transformation Towards New Forms of Organizing

Abstract

Since the mid-1990s, claims have been put forward in the management literature of the emergence of new organizational forms, which would go beyond the Chandlerian "command and control" and divisional structures and instead would rely more on internal networks and less hierarchical management styles. This exploratory article examines the role of organizational culture in the transformation process of four innovative companies in the German-speaking area. We find that people in the two organizations characterized by rapid and comprehensive organizational innovation report that the importance of organizational culture has increased significantly over the 1992-1997 period, especially as a vertical, and to a lesser extent as a horizontal and cross-unit coordination mechanism. People at the two companies with an ethnocentric management orientation systematically report that organizational culture plays a less important role as a co-ordination mechanism than do people at companies with a geocentric orientation. Corporate size did not appear to be related to the importance that people adhere to organizational culture as a co-ordination mechanism.