Collectivism and Its Consequences for Organizational Culture

Collectivism is a peoples’ tendency to think of themselves as parts of different collectives and subordinate their behavior to norms, duties, and obligations imposed by these collectives. The collectivistic attitudes influence, besides other social institutions, also the organizational behavior. The main goal of this study was to explore how three different types of collectivist attitudes (familism, companionship, and patriotism) shape organizational culture in the context of various sociodemographic characteristics, including ethnicity. One thousand three hundred and twenty eight employees from 16 different organizations in Estonia were studied in respect to their attitudes towards organizational culture and collectivism. It was demonstrated that independently of sociodemographic variables, the collectivistic attitudes were related to the way the organization members accept organizational goals and evaluate in terpersonal relationships within the organization. The constructed model of the relationship between collectivistic and organizational attitudes revealed potential sources of organizational tension, namely, between work and family, between workers and adminis trators, and between different ethnic groups with diverse cultural background. 1 University of Tartu, Faculty Economics and Business Administration, PhD, e-mail: [email protected] 2 University of Tartu, Department of Psycology, PhD, e-mail: [email protected] 3 University of Leuven, Belgium, Department of Psychology and University of Tartu, Department of Psychology, PhD, e-mail: [email protected] The second and the third author were fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in the Social Sciences (Uppsala, Sweden) during the preparation of this article.