Organisational culture as a stress determinant in SME sector organisations.

This paper is theoretical and empirical in nature. Its first purpose is to present the results of authors' own empirical research devoted to assessing the present and expected organisational culture model in Polish SME sector employees' opinion. Another key research objective was to assess occurrence of some statistically significant dependencies between the declared model of the organisational culture and the perception of the present level of respondents' stress. Two research tools were used in the research process: the Organisational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) by Cameron and Quinn and the authors' own questionnaire to assess the occurrence and intensity of any dysfunctional phenomena at the workplace, including the level of employees' stress. Statistical analysis of significant differences between variables was conducted with Pearson's chi-square test of independence. Anonymous empirical research, on a randomly selected sample (N = 700) of respondents from the Silesian Region in Poland was run in 2017, with the paper (hard) copy of both research instruments. The research results show that the current model of the organisational culture is a statistically significant determinant of employees' level of negative stress in all kinds of analysed organisations.