THE PERFORMANCE EFFECTS OF FIT BETWEEN ACCOUNTING FIRM ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS: SOME EVIDENCE FROM TAIWAN

Abstract

In the current era of intensifying global competition, much attention has been focused on how companies need to change their structures and processes, or more broadly, organizational cultures, to remain competitive in this environment. Three recent studies have examined the nature of accounting firms' organizational cultures. Soeters and Schreuder (1988) and Pratt, Mohrweis and Beaulieu (1993) tested the degree to which accounting firms are able to transfer their home‐country or ganizational cultures to their foreign operations, while Pratt and Beaulieu (1992) analyzed the organizational culture of U.S. accounting firms operating in their home country. An implicit premise of these prior studies is that an accounting firm's organizational culture is an important determinant of its economic success. Thus, Pratt and Beaulieu (1992) hypothesized that organizational culture would vary with such variables as accounting firm size and functional area. Yet none of these prior studies has directly studied the nature of these firms’ external environments to which they were presumably responding. Nor have they directly measured the fit between these firms' organizational cultures and the external environment, or the effect of this fit on firm performance. The current study extends the empirical investigation to these assumed linkages. Data were collected from a sample of accounting firms operating in an important Pacific Rim participant in the global economy — Taiwan. The results are consistent with the fit between organizational culture and the environment being an important determinant of firm performance.