FINAL NOTE
It is suggested that an optimal culture will have a foundation of moderate levels of
transactional culture, but have high levels of transformational culture (Bass 1998; Bass &
Avolio 1993). However, the ODQ does not reflect the positive and necessary transactional
aspects of effective organisations. Rather, the ODQ sets up a dichotomy of
transformational/transactional, effective/ ineffective, or good/ bad cultural types. This is
represented in the high negative correlation between transformational and transactional
culture.
It is argued that this dichotomy is false and, therefore, a possible useful research direction
would be to move outside the bounds of the transformational and transactional culture split.
After all, Avolio, Bass & Jung (1999) found conceptual overlap between transformational and
transactional leadership. Also, individual transactional leadership is separated into a
constructive transaction and a corrective transaction (Bass & Avolio 1997). In the ODQ, as it
presently stands, the corrective transaction is over-represented at the expense of the
constructive transaction. Culture may be described in many ways other than those forms that
can be positioned within the structures set by the ODQ. Alternative scales measuring
organisational culture reinforce this point by demonstrating the importance of both multidimensionality and breadth of the construct of culture. For example, The Organisational
Culture Inventory (Cooke & Lafferty 1989) includes twelve sub-scales of cultural dimensions,
while the Organisational Beliefs Questionnaire (Sashkin 1984) measures ten subscales. The
Organizational Culture Profile (O’Reilly, Chatman & Caldwell, 1991) has eight subscales.