The organisational culture gap between management and work groups: links with continuous improvement performance in the UK manufacturing sector

Abstract

Considerable research into the strength of organisational culture and the links with performance has been undertaken in recent decades. Acceptance of widely shared or strong cultures outperforming narrowly shared or weak cultures is limited. The demarcation point between strong and weak cultures is not clearly defined. This thesis presents research that investigates the organisational cultures, continuous improvement capability and the continuous improvement performance of 10 work groups within three manufacturing companies in the South of England. The quantitative methods employ the Broadfoot and Ashkanasy (1993) organisational profile, the CIRCA CI (1997) self assessment tool and a Continuous Improvement performance assessment tool which was informed by the work of Borg et al. (2006). Semi-structured interviews were also conducted in this longitudinal study. A co-production of knowledge stage following the field study provides additional findings.

Date of Award	Dec 2010
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	University of Brighton