Innovation supportive culture in it-organizations:a comparison of perceptions between managers and employees

• Main Author: Laitinen, N. (Niilo)
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: University of Oulu 2016
• Subjects: Information Processing Science
• Online Access: http://urn.fi/URN:NBN:fi:oulu-201603251355; http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:fi:oulu-201603251355

The organizational ability to innovate and support employee creativity have been touted to be crucial aspects for organizations in order to ensure their continuity and increased competitiveness. In the literature, organizational culture has been identified as a possible solution for supporting organizations’ ability to innovate. Despite the merits of innovation supportive culture, organizational culture has been recognized as an ambiguous concept, which often leaves organizational managers mystified on how culture should be changed in order to gain the expected benefits. Therefore, even if the management’s endeavor is to increase innovation and creativity through culture, the actual embedded culture may not meet this goal. This thesis has contributed to the discussion of innovation supportive culture by identifying aspects of organizational culture and climate, which have been argued in the literature to support organizational innovation and creativity. Based on the identified aspects, a culture perception framework was devised in order to examine the perceptions of the managers and employees regarding innovation supportive culture in their organizations. Five IT-organizations were asked to participate in the study from which three organizations, Elbit, Solita and Sysart, responded and agreed to participate. Total 8 interviews were conducted for this thesis, which included interviews with a manager from each of the organizations, and interviews with 2 employees per organization except for Elbit where only 1 employee could be interviewed. The data gathering was conducted utilizing semi-structured interview in order to define the scope of the interviews to match with the devised Culture perception framework. The interviews focused on the innovation supportive aspects presented in the Culture perception framework and strived to identify the perceptions of managers and employees regarding innovation supportive culture in their organizations. The conducted research revealed that the perceptions of culture between managers and employees were mostly congruent in all of the case organizations. Higher levels of incongruence was identified in all of the organizations in the aspect of reward emphasis, on which the interviewees’ perceptions were partly contradictory. Based on the results, further research is suggested to identify the reasons behind incongruent perceptions regarding reward emphasis.