Page 61 - Crossing Cultural Boundaries - Cees den Teuling

underlying values, believes and principles. It serves as a foundation for an organisation’s management system, as well as the set of management practices and behaviours that both exemplify and reinforce those basic principles. Some aspects of OC, such as individual behaviour and group norms, are very visible. “working hard”, “dressing conservatively” or “acting friendly” are aspects of culture that are easy to observe. Denison argues that the invisible assumptions represent other aspects, such as values and core beliefs. Examples are “being honest and ethical in transactions” and “going beyond customer’s expectations”.
Table 1: Comparison of Models: The Denison Model vs. Other Cultural Oriented Models
DENISON MODEL
OTHER CULTURAL ORIENTED MODELS
Behavioural based
Often psychologically or personality based
Designed and created within the organisational environment
Often designed and created within the academic environment
Linked to bottom-line business results
Often unclear about specific links to business results; little if any research conducted placing cultural elements in relation to performance
Fast and easy to implement
Often extensive time is required to implement assessment and/or interpret results in the organisational context
Applicable to all levels of the organisation
Specially designed for either top level or front lines implementation
What are the relationships between (organisational) culture and knowledge sharing? The types of relationships between these two categories are based on a double- sided statement. On one side, it is a conceptual (or internal) relationship, characterised in reciprocity: knowledge defines culture and culture defines knowledge. On the other side, it is the influencing (or external) relationship, such as exponents of the conceptual direction (“Culture = Knowledge”). Cleland and Bidanda (1990) identifies knowledge as a component of culture. According to them, an OC is the milieu of beliefs, customs, as well as knowledge practices and conventionalised behaviour of a specific social group. According to Schein (1985) who put an equality sign between culture and knowledge, knowledge refers to solutions that a group accepts as valid within that
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