JultikaUniversity of Oulu repository

Abstract

This study aims to provide an understanding about the determinants in organizational culture that promote organizational innovation. It is important for organizations to continuously engage in innovative activities to face the market competition and be successful in long term. Organizational culture acts as a backbone to support organizational innovation to take place efficiently. There are different frameworks used in literature to analyse organizational culture and this thesis will use four determinants which will be more suitable to explore the impact of them on organizational innovation. This thesis aims to develop the theoretical understanding about the organizational culture and innovation related concepts and analyse how these theories are practiced in businesses.

This thesis is qualitative research and used the abductive research approach. The main research question of this thesis is “What are the determinants in organizational culture that promote organizational innovation?” and the sub research question is “How does organizational culture impact organizational innovation?”. Empirical data has been gathered from seven in depth interviews conducted with management level professionals of organizations in Finland which involve with innovations as their core business activity. In depth interviews provided detailed insights from the interviewees related to how organizational culture and innovation are practiced in real business world. The gathered data has been converted to text and analysed using the NVivo software to get better understanding and to explore relationships between different concepts.

The research findings suggest that organizational culture promotes in achieving organizational innovation. Findings from this research mostly align with the existing literature and proves the validity of the literature defined. Key findings describe that teamwork, extensive communication, reward system and, training and development support in organizations to achieve innovation. The results of this thesis can be used by organizations to evaluate their own processes related to organizational culture and develop them to better support in innovation process. This study can be used generally to all organizations globally but sometimes the perceptions regarding organizational culture and innovation in different countries can be differ. This study was conducted by considering Finland market and further research is needed to identify impact of these four determinants on organizational culture in different countries.