Is the recent popular management literature on corporate culture and cultural values just a passing fad or is it highlighting some fundamental organizational realities? The results from a recent nationwide survey of American managers shows, we are convinced, that clearly articulated organizational values do make a significant difference in the lives of employees, as well as in their organization's performance. This article is an effort to integrate this broad‐based data on individual managers' values with the reported experience of successful organizations that pay careful attention to their culture. It also offers ideas on how human resource managers can facilitate the alignment of personal and organizational values.
An instrument to measure the behaviors of leaders was developed using a variety of samples of managers and their subordinates employed in both public and private sector organizations. Factor analyses supported the underlying conceptual framework and investigations of differences by public and private sector organizational affiliation, American and international origins, and gender revealed few significant differences. Discriminant analysis results suggested good predictive validity in terms of leaders' effectiveness and behavior.
The dominant paradigm of organizations, on which organization development (OD) is based, is industry-specific in theory and practice. The traditional manner by which OD technology has been transferred to the human services field presumes that the same theories and practices prevail here as well. The authors challenge this presumption. They suggest that the behavior of human services organizations (HSOs) is based on a fundamentally different paradigm, which necessitates both a new organizational theory and a different OD practice. The authors introduce and discuss a theory of organizational behavior in HSOs, integrating their own experiences with the works of Bell, Jaques, Weick, Weisbord, and others. They suggest that HSOs are comprised of three distinct domains-the Policy Domain, the Management Domain, and the Service Domain. They maintain that each domain operates by different and contrasting principles, success measures, structural arrangements, and work modes, and that the interactions between these create natural conditions of disjunction and discordance. This paradigm of conflicting domains can serve as a new conceptual guide to OD in HSOs, as well as aid to the development and refinement of new OD methods and tools specific to these organizations.
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