The effects of employee perceived organisational culture on performance: the moderating effects of management maturity

This study explores the effects of management maturity on the relationship between organisational culture and organisational performance from the perspective of employees. Many companies experience unsuccessful management initiatives (e.g. lean or six sigma) and find that such failures are a result of emulating management tools without learning the underlying philosophy. Therefore, this study built a moderating model for management maturity (as expressed in standards such as ISO 9004) to explore bureaucratic, innovative, supportive cultures’ effects on organisational performance. We collected data via survey questionnaires distributed through the website of a large steel company and received 324 valid responses. Our results show that management maturity moderates the relationship between innovative culture and organisational performance; that is, employees who perceived a higher level of management maturity from their management team also felt more positive about their organisation’s performance. However, this is not found for bureaucratic culture or supportive culture. Management maturity is vital, albeit long neglected, as it exerts a medium, positive moderating effect on innovative culture, and a medium, negative moderating effect on bureaucratic culture and supportive culture.