Profile of the respondents
Roughly a proportional number of responses were collected from all the four industries
surveyed. Most of the respondents (54.9 percent) occupied top management positions
while 45.1 percent were middle managers, indicating that they were in a good position to
perceive and describe the emphasis of their company values relating to internal
integration and external adaptation of their firms (Tsui et al., 2006). All the respondents
had served their “current” firms for more than five years and thus are expected to be
familiar with the culture of their organization quite well. The firms served in the local,
regional and global markets with most of the firms (42.2 percent) serving the global
market. An overwhelming majority (93.5 percent) of the firms had been operating for
more than ten years and thus can be considered quite established. Around 85 percent
of the firms had more than 100 employees while around 84 percent earned revenue of
more than $300,000 (a million Ringgit Malaysia (RM)). All these statistics indicate
that all the four surveyed industries are well represented and that the respondents
were qualified enough to respond to the questions about the organizational culture
of their firms which, judging by the firm age, revenue and number of employees,
were quite established. These descriptive statistics of the demographic variables are
presented below in Table I.