intranet, you would get an almost instantaneous response (Programme Manager, aged 36,
with Technostar for five years).
The widely felt informality of organisational culture makes it possible for employees to
approach people freely and this often results in knowledge dissemination, thus
contributing uniquely to productivity.
The qualitative data suggests that organisational culture is characterised by an
emphasis on high performance work orientation and that there are many
organisational systems like performance-based pay and bonuses, which tend to
reinforce this emphasis. Besides this, the in-depth interviews reveal that the large
number of employees in the younger age group have a high performance work
orientation and many of them have ambitions to work overseas with leading
multinational organisations. The work in the software organisations studied involves
lots of outsourced projects from multinational organisations, and the analysis of the
data suggests that this encourages employees to take up initiatives and exhibit extra
role behaviours, thus contributing to increased productivity. The in-depth interviews
also suggest that many employees associate a lucrative “overseas stint” (when they
work in client offices overseas and are paid in foreign currency) with outstanding
work; this often prompts employees to exhibit extra role behaviours, and this has the
effect of enhancing productivity. The interviews and observations suggest that even
artefacts of organisational culture like external ambience make a subtle contribution in
enhancing productivity. One of the software engineers in Elegant remarked during the
course of the interviews:
. . . see the water fountains and the greenery around. When I get stuck while writing codes, I
take a walk around the campus . . .] Sometimes the whole team goes out to play basketball.
This makes my mind fresh and I am back at work full of energy.
The researcher could observe that a number of artefacts of organisational life like the
gymnasium, food courts and basketball courts play a subtle role in improving
productivity in the context of the intellectual work done in software organisations.
The qualitative study found that there was a strong relationship between
organisational culture and quality. The interviews and observations provide insights
into the process through which culture tends to influence the implementation and
adherence to quality. Technostar follows a policy of “people first” and encourages high
levels of empowerment and agreements on issues by mutual give and take, and it is
widely believed that this often leads to enhanced quality. For example, the high level of
empowerment encourages software engineers to have constant formal and informal
customer interfaces, and this raises the awareness of the implications of quality issues
and contributes to better compliance. Furthermore, organisational culture even
influences the way in which quality initiatives are planned and implemented. This
draws strong support from the argument of Bright and Cooper (1993, p. 25) that
“culture purists” attach a key role to organisational culture in the internalisation and
implementation of quality initiatives. One of the managers in charge of quality in
Technostar points out:
We follow the PCMM model for quality assurance. We went slowly into the process of
implementing the CMM. We explained to our people the need for CMM and reasoned it out
with them. It took us much more time than many other organisations, but this raised its
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culture
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acceptability tremendously. As a result, compliance is very high (Manager, quality, aged 44,
with Technostar for two years).
Furthermore, another significant impact of culture on quality is that culture blends
many of the tenets of quality to the basic assumptions of organisational life. The
researcher stayed into the night in each organisation three times, and could observe
that work extended to the early hours of the next day. On one such occasion, the team
members were about to leave soon after finishing the work, when two of them
reminded their colleagues that the codes needed to be documented before they left, and
described the complications that arose when codes were not properly recorded on an
early occasion. The whole team willingly stayed for some more time, documented all
the codes and only then left the premises. The senior manager in charge of quality in
Elegant commented:
Many times I have seen that our software engineers and managers take more caution than
laid down by our norms and processes in fixing bugs. Many times this averted serious
problems. This is because we repose tremendous faith in our people. Think about young
people in their late twenties handling projects worth millions of dollars and directly dealing
with our customers (Senior manager aged 39, with Elegant for six years).
The qualitative study reveals that the intellectual nature of the work involved makes
the role of organis