Abstract
Academic literature has long recognized the correlation between a company’s organizational culture and its quality performance. The Finnish construction industry is still a highly human powered industry, and thus, organizational culture is seen to have a significant effect on an organization’s efficiency as well. The aim of this study is to examine and determine organizational cultural profiles of organizations in the Finnish construction industry as they are currently perceived and preferred by professionals themselves. In all, 121 professionals working in organizations in the Finnish construction industry were surveyed using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI). The reliability of characteristics was tested by calculating Cronbach alpha reliability coefficients, and the found differences between the response characteristics were analysed in-depth with paired and independent t-test analyses. The findings show that, on average, construction industry organizations in Finland currently operate with a mixture of clan and hierarchy cultures. Thus, the current organizational culture stresses the point of view of internal focus and integration. However, the organizations desired to emphasize more flexibility and discretion toward individuals. The novelty value of this paper is presenting existing and preferred culture profiles in the Finnish construction industry. These found profiles have the potential to improve management of organizations, which results in better efficiency of the industry through better performance of organizations in the construction industry.
Highlights
The influence of organizational culture (OC) on organizational performance and efficiency has long been recognized in the academic literature (e.g. Siehl and Martin 1990; Liu and Zhang 2003)
Effectiveness issues have plagued the Finnish construction industry during the last two decades, and as OC is regarded as one of the key factors affecting the effectiveness of a company (Alas, Kraus and Niglas, 2009), the heavily human-powered industry is identified to have a great opportunity to enhance its current level of effectiveness through its OC (e.g. Liu and Zhang 2003; Zhang and Liu 2006)
The absolute scores in the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) results are irrelevant, and it is more important to understand the movement of the culture profile: which typologies are strong in the current situation and which are strongly preferred
Summary
The influence of organizational culture (OC) on organizational performance and efficiency has long been recognized in the academic literature (e.g. Siehl and Martin 1990; Liu and Zhang 2003). OC in the construction industry has not been given serious attention until the late 1990s and early 2000s. The human behaviour aspect in the construction industry seems still to be neglected based on the relatively scarce number of academic studies over the topic (Teräväinen, Suominen, and Kähkönen, 2017; Cheung, Wong and Wu, 2011). Effectiveness issues have plagued the Finnish construction industry during the last two decades, and as OC is regarded as one of the key factors affecting the effectiveness of a company (Alas, Kraus and Niglas, 2009), the heavily human-powered industry is identified to have a great opportunity to enhance its current level of effectiveness through its OC The most forward-looking companies have already achieved success by departing from entrenched construction business models and practices (Cheung, Wong and Lam, 2012) as a continuously changing business environment requires fresh perspectives and innovativeness from today’s construction (Nummelin, 2007; Yepes et al 2016; Monahan, Coates and Clarke-Hagan; Castro et al, 2012)
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