ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR

Organizational culture in the public sector

Organizational culture in the public sector

Introduction

This work is part of a larger investigation which is developed in the framework of the Centre for Research in Public Administration from the Faculty of Economics, University of Buenos Aires. It aims to analyze organizational culture in the public system so that developing below represents only a portion of the results.

In the course of the investigation, we have approached the State reform process, within this, we have dedicated our efforts to studying organizational culture. So far, this issue has been sparingly explored by the academic production. To this end, our main goal has been to develop a diagnosis of the organizational culture at the Central Public Administration (CPA) in Argentina. Anyway, hope that the diagnosis mentioned, far from closing the discussions on this problem into account, raising new questions that may require further research on the subject (David, 2002).

Discussion

Since the crisis of the interventionist state model, which was examined in the 1970, different governments have tried and still trying to organizational changes in the Argentine public sector. 1. Most of them, generally known as state reform processes have been designed from a mechanistic paradigm, which presupposes the immediate bonding of two phenomena that are necessarily interrelated: the successful implementation of these into effective, efficient and aligned with the objectives that governments seek to achieve.

Conversely, we have supported the hypothesis that between policy and its implementation there are a number of phenomena, which we include under the concept of organizational culture that influence the immediate link between the two points raised by the previous paradigm. Therefore, organizational culture is a factor that may enhance or obstruct reform processes of State designed from traditional mechanistic paradigm (loyd , 2004).

For the development of diagnosis, we used quantitative techniques, essentially a self-administered survey of standardized questions, which allowed us to identify a set of indices of organizational culture, such as: work values, the cultural types both preferred and perceived by public employees, and finally the basic underlying assumptions that guide the behavior of those working in these organizations.

As a hypothesis derived held that this omission could explain, in part, the limited effectiveness of these processes in public bodies. In this regard, we understand that there is a deep relationship between state reform and organizational culture. This led us to reflect on the process of reform from within the state apparatus itself and ask how this process affected people as permanent employees working there.

Moreover, we believe that this deficit in the consideration of variables associated with organizational culture, denotes a contradiction: on the one hand, the discourse of modernization, which legitimize the reform processes of State and emphasize ideas such as strategy and rationality, and, moreover, the existing organizational culture that would point in an opposite direction. That is, the public organizational culture would not be aligned with the objectives and strategy - organizational structure (ammuto, ...