Organizational culture and development

It has been argued recently that, in conjunction with a number of other factors, the existence of a central core of committed organizational members who share the same set of positive values and beliefs is a necessary condition, or imperative, for enhancing organizational effectiveness in developing countries (Blunt, 1990a). This article develops that position by identifying a progressive series of models of organizational culture which, it is proposed, are associated with different levels of organizational effectiveness and stages of economic development. Organizational culture, or the 'collective programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one category of people from those of another' (Hofstede and Bond, 1988), is an idea which has dominated thinking about organizations in recent times. It is not a new idea (Blunt, 1988), and anyone who has studied social anthropology, played team sports, served in the armed forces, or worked in almost any formal organization for that matter, will probably wonder what all the fuss is about. Part of the explanation has to do with the great divide between what managers know to be important about organizations implicitly but are often unable to articulate and the traditional disinclination of researchers and academicians in the field to pay attention to what is under their noses. This gap was bridged in the early 1980s with the publication of In Search of Excellence by Peters and Waterman (1982), two articulate and persuasive practitioners who found an enthusiastic world-wide audience among managers (Blunt, 1990b). The book's main message was that organizational culture mattered a great deal and that the feature which distinguished America's most successful corporations from the rest was the importance they attached to it, which would guarantee their continued success. This prediction failed, but the culture prophecy that is, the importance of organizational culture as a necessary if not sufficient condition for effectiveness lived on. Then, as now, the East Asian economies, especially that of Japan, were booming and culture both national and organizational seemed to offer a plausible partial explanation (Kahn,