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Measuring organizational cultures: a qualitative and quantitative study across twenty cases
Administrative Science Quarterly, June, 1990 by Geert Hofstede, Bram Neuijen, Denise Daval Ohayv, Geert Sanders
In the same way as for employee versus job orientation, we believe the philosophy of the organization's founder(s) and top leaders plays a strong role in P4 (open vs. closed system). Communication climates in the units we studied seemed to have been formed historically without much outside rationale; some organizations had developed a tradition of being closed, others of remarkable openness. In the national context, however, open vs. closed was the only one of the six practices dimensions that was significantly associated with nationality: an open organizational communication climate is more characteristic of Danish than of Dutch organizations. However, one Danish unit scored as extremely closed and had been perceived by its environment and by its own members as a very closed organization for over a century.
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The open-closed dimension in Table 4 is responsible for the single strongest correlation in the matrix: .78 between the percentage of women among employees and the openness of the communication climate. The percentage of women among managers and the presence of at least one woman in the top-management team are also correlated with openness. However, this correlation is affected by the bi-national composition of the research population. Among developed European countries, Denmark has one of the highest participation rates of women in the workforce, and the Netherlands one of the lowest (although steeply increasing). Also, as reported above, Danish units as a group, with one exception, score as much more open than Dutch units. This does not necessarily exclude a causal relationship between the participation of women in the workforce and a more open communication climate. Among the Danish units taken separately, the correlation between the percentage of women employees and openness is also significant, but not among the Dutch units, which may be the effect of the restricted range of scores of the Dutch units on "openness." All in all, the relationship between female participation in the labor force and openness of the organization's communication climate is a finding that merits further research.
Other correlates of the open vs. closed dimension are an association of more formalization with a more closed culture (a suitable validation of both measures), of admitting controversial issues into the employee journal with a more open culture (another validation), of higher average seniority with a more open culture, and of a high percentage of supervisory personnel with a more open culture.
On dimension P5 (loose vs. tight control), units delivering precision or risky products or services (such as pharmaceuticals or money transactions) tended to score as tight on control, those with innovative or unpredictable activities tended to score as loose. To our surprise, the two municipal police corps we studied scored on the loose control side (16 and 41): the work of a policeman, however, is highly unpredictable, and police personnel have considerable discretion in the way they want to carry out their task.
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