The Relationships between Organisational Culture and Management Innovation in Polish Enterprises

Organisational culture is considered to be one of the key elements in both enhancing and inhibiting innovation. Various research works have been conclusive as to the key role of culture in innovation (Ahmed, 1998; Dobni, 2008; Higgins & Mcallaster, 2002; Jassawalla, Sashittal, 2002; Lau & Ngo, 2004; Martins & Terblanche, 2003; Mumford, 2000). Researchers have studied empirically the relationships among organisational culture and product innovation or organizational innovation, but fewer researchers have studied management innovations as being impacted by organisational culture. Management innovation consists of changing a firm’s organisational form, practices and processes in a way that is new to the firm and/or industry and results in leveraging the firm’s technological knowledge base and its performance in terms of innovation, productivity and competitiveness (Volberda & Van Den Bosch & Heij, 2013). In other words, management innovations are changes in how managers work. The aim of our paper is to assess the relationships between organizational culture and management innovation. We base on Dobni’s concept of innovative organisational culture, who defines it as a multidimensional context which consists of four dimensions: Innovation Intention, Innovation Infrastructure, Innovation Influence and Innovation Implementation (Dobni, 2008; Dobni, 2010). In terms of management innovation, we assume that it is a multidimensional construct comprising five dimensions: a strategic dimension, a structural dimension, employee motivation and development methods/practices, interorganisational relations and an ICT dimension (Krasnicka et al., 2014). Data for the study were collected in 2014 through a survey from 301 enterprises in Poland. Responses were analyzed to assess the relationships between organizational culture and management innovation.