ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND INNOVATION: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY IN BRAZILIAN COMPANIES

Organizational culture is viewed as an important variable to innovation success; it can stimulate creativity and innovative behavior among employees. Besides, companies have adopted different practices to improve its social aspects into innovation direction. Moreover, the growth of international companies with foreign subsidiaries, forces them to adopt the most effective organizational practices to all business units in order to build a sustainable competitive advantage. In this context, this work uses data from 42 large manufacturing companies located in Brazil to investigate the organizational culture profile and the adoption of organizational innovation practices. Furthermore, uses Kruskal-Wallis Test to investigate if there is difference in the adoption of practices if the companies’ headquarters is located in Brazil or abroad. Results show that the characteristics of innovative organizational culture profile called Developmental culture were the less identified, as a result, companies still need to develop characteristics of innovative culture, such as assumption of risks, employees’ participation. Among the practices, those related to multidisciplinary teams and high variety in employees’ tasks were the most adopted, while job rotation and self-managed team the less adopted. In addition, for most practices, no difference was identified in the adoption if headquarters’ is located in Brazil or abroad, supporting the idea that organizational culture is more important driver of innovation than national culture.