Organizational Culture vs. Structure: An Academic Case Study

In order to implement knowledge management in an organization, a first step is assessing the readiness. The readiness is directly influenced by the organization culture, structure and infrastructure. This paper aims to assess the first two factors in a particular case, the Politehnica University of Timisoara (UPT). Due to the fact that the organization structure is well-defined, our efforts centred mainly in determining the organizational culture. The UPT, due to the various faculties and administrative divisions has created a non-linear organizational culture. Apart from the established way of assessing organizational culture, the Organizational Culture Profile (OCP), based on Q-sort, we focused on analysis of social networks interactions in order to determine organizational culture. We correlated the collected data with the age distribution, in order to investigate possible discrepancies. In the organizational structure the most influential were higher level academics with an older bias. Unlike the organizational structure, on a cultural level, the most influential were middle level, young to middle age individuals that showed the highest availability for communication. This non-congruency was even further illustrated when paired with student-teacher relationship data. The same middle level individuals had the highest communication strength, thus the highest influence on the students. Even the total number of connections indicated the same individuals as the most influential. An interesting fact implied the gender distribution. While in the organizational structure there is a clear partiality towards the males, in the organizational culture there is no such bias, both sexes being (almost) equally influential. Further analysis including all the data, put under scrutiny the readiness for knowledge management in UPT. As a result, a guideline and several tactics are proposed in order to improve the readiness.