The Impact of the Organizational Culture on the Employee Proactivity: Empirical Study in Innovation Oriented Companies

Abstract

The achievement of a new industrial leadership in the world arena is directly related to the development and sustainable competitiveness of modern innovation oriented organizations. Practice shows that companies capable of maximally using the initiative of ordinary workers, their professional competence and independence, turn the routine, monotonous, performing work into instrumental-experimental, innovative activity of creative professionals achieve the greatest success. At the same time, the formation of management approaches that allow combining personnel initiative with its target-focused application in the organization is still an unsolved problem for many innovation oriented companies. This study analyzes the impact of the organizational culture on the personality mechanisms of employee proactivity that facilitate their self-fulfillment through participation in initiative activity. The empirical study has been conducted in the Russian companies on the basis of the model of employee proactivity potential, including self-leadership, self-directed learning, and engagement, describing the behavioral dominants of initiative employees. As a result of the study, it has been established that employees with different dominants of proactive behavior have different perceptions of significance of norms, rules and values concentrated in the company culture, which does not depend on the age or size of the company, but can be related to certain cultural traits caused by priority areas in the activity of the companies included in the study. It has been established that initiative increase in the employees with “self-leadership” dominant is facilitated by teamwork-focused value attitude; with “selfdirected learning” dominant – by significance and encouragement of the employee’s self-development drive; with “engagement” dominant – by affinity and interrelatedness between life goals and interests of the employee and those of the company. The obtained results demonstrate that unfolding of the intrinsic energy of employees in the purposes of organizational development is facilitated by shaping a culture on the basis of value attitudes that take into account the dominants of initiative behavior. This finding contributes to the understanding of the role of organizational culture in a modern innovation oriented company. Keywords—organizational culture, employee proactive behavior, employee proactivity potential, self-leadership, selfdirected learning, employee engagement, innovation oriented companies