Assessment approaches of managing organizational culture in technological innovation in Hong Kong

Abstract

During the last decade the competitors of an organization consisted of organizations operating in the same industrial sector and geographic region. In today’s business world, however, the situation has changed. Organizations are competing with competitors from around the world. The geographical boundaries are now profoundly influenced by the use of technologies. Organizations need to improve their efficiency and shorten their response time to markets. It is widely accepted that technological innovation is driving organizations to achieve their goals. In fact, one could even say that cultural inertia that causes organizations to fail to defend themselves against competitors will result in profit erosion. This research explores the relationship between technological innovativeness and organizational culture in Hong Kong. It measures both the technical and administrative innovation status of organizations. A questionnaire survey was conducted to collect cultural information of organizations in Hong Kong, measuring the impact of three organizational factors, namely Organizational Characteristics (OCH), Organizational Climate (OCL), and Organizational Context (OCO). The temporal information of technological innovations was also examined: Mean Number of Innovation Adoptions (MNIA), Mean Time of Innovation Adoptions (MTIA), and Consistency of the Time of Adoptions (CTA). The questionnaire survey explored the relationships amongst organizational cultural factors and the technological innovation progress of organizations. In order to select the most important cultural factors amongst, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used to prioritize the cultural factors. The prioritization was done with the senior managements from eighteen organizations of the electronic product manufacturing industry. This research developed a hierarchical model for organizations to develop their own cultural management approach. Self-assessment is widely adopted in quality management. It is a useful tool to help organizations assess their performance and identify areas for improvement. The well-known tools are European Foundation for Quality Management Model (EFQM) and Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award (MBNQ). However, the application of self-assessment in organizational culture management for technological innovations has not been well developed in the past. Based on the results obtained from the questionnaire survey and AHP, this research develops a self-assessment system to help organizations to manage their cultural change processes for technological innovations. As it is believed that technological innovations are a continuous process, this research suggests a continuous improvement model of technological innovation readiness, namely DAIE (Development – Assessment – Improvement – Evaluation). The DAIE model is further defined into thirteen steps to provide a user-friendly tool to organizations. This research invited eight organizations to participate in a self-assessment trial run. The organizations were classified into one of four categories, based on the score they obtained, namely Unaware, Beginning, Improving, and Accomplishing. The results demonstrated that there is room for organizations to improve in the process of technological innovations. This research describes the improvement and the evaluation processes in detail and provides guidelines to organizations. The self-assessment model was further tested by a pilot implementation with a department of an organization. While the trial test focused only on the self-assessment process, the pilot implementation provided a comprehensive test of all four phases: Development, Assessment, Improvement and Evaluation.

Date of Award	2 Oct 2007
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	City University of Hong Kong
Supervisor	Ying Kit Richard FUNG (Supervisor)