Authors: Paraskevi Boufounou, Eleni Gkila

Title: Comparing Organizational Culture and Growth in Dynamic Sectors in Greece: Telecoms vs Banking

Abstract

The importance of Organizational Culture as a factor affecting profitability, competitiveness and growth has preoccupied scholars over the past twenty years. In ​​Greece, organizational culture becomes of particular importance in the recent years due to the pertaining financial crisis. The present paper presents the empirical findings of an OCAI questionnaire survey carried out amongst the employees of  COSMOTE (one of the large telecoms company presently), exploring their views in the existing organizational culture and the desired one in the future (in a period of five years’ time). Furthermore, these results are compared to the corresponding ones in the Greek Banking sector, a dynamic where radical reforms and consolidation took place the last few years as well. The results proved that in both sectors the dominant culture is the “Hierarchy Culture” whereas the preferred culture for the future is the “Clan Culture”, still the telecoms’ results are more structured towards “clan structure” than those of the banking sector. These findings are of immense importance as organizational culture issues play a key role in formulating future strategic plans.