ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE Organizational Culture and Leadership, 3rd Edition

CULTURAL TYPOLOGIES 193cratic or participative is ultimately highly colored by the assumptionsof a particular group in a particular context. The search for theuniversally correct leadership style is doomed to failure because ofcultural variation by country, by industry, by occupation, and by theparticular history of a given organization.Typologies of CorporateCharacter and CultureThe concept of corporate character was first introduced into the cultureliterature by Wilkins (1989), who saw it as a component of cultureconsisting of “shared vision,” “motivational faith” that thingswould be fair and that abilities would be used, and “distinctiveskills,” both overt and tacit. In his view, “building character” waspossible by emphasizing programs dealing with each of the components,but he did not build a typology around the dimensions.Goffee and Jones (1998), on the other hand, saw character asequivalent to culture and created a typology based on two keydimensions: “solidarity”—the tendency to be like-minded, and“sociability”—the tendency to be friendly to each other. Thesedimensions are measured with a twenty-three-item self-descriptionquestionnaire. They closely resemble and are derivative from theclassical group dynamics distinction between task variables andbuilding and maintenance variables. These same two dimensionswere also used extensively by Blake and Mouton (1964, 1969,1989) in their organization development grid, which was built onthe two dimensions of task and group building, each to be measuredon a scale of 1 to 9. A highly sociable, person-oriented organizationthat cared little for task accomplishment would be rated as 1,9,whereas a highly task-oriented, driven, and insensitive organizationwould be rated 9,1. Various other combinations were possible, rangingfrom 1,1 (which is virtually a state of anomie) to 5,5 (a compromisesolution) to 9,9, the hero of the model, in which task andpersonal factors are given equal weight.