Strategic Representation of an Abstract Reality: Spiraling Relations between Organizational Culture and Innovativeness

Abstract

Innovation is still one of the most debated topics among the academics and business professionals. The question of how organizations innovate captures attention from many disciplines and leads to extensive amount of research. Although there are many variables that affect an organization’s innovative performance, organizational culture can be considered as a key issue as it is strongly associated with the values, attitudes, behaviors and organizational practices. As organizations have different cultural profiles and, in many cases, competing cultural values exist within the organization simultaneously, it is difficult to build one-dimensional linkages about the relations between organizational culture and innovativeness.
This study aims to analyze the relations between innovativeness and four different organizational cultures including team, entrepreneurial, hierarchical and rational cultures. A sample of 371 surveys was collected from five leading companies operating in the chemicals industry in Eskisehir, Turkey.