DIAGNOSING ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE THROUGH METAPHORS AND TASK AND RELATIONSHIP ORIENTATIONS

Organizational culture is a system of meanings that are shared to various degrees inside the organization. Several surveys have been conducted to measure the different factors of organizational culture, but not many surveys have aimed to demonstrate the essence of organizational culture. Thus, the main contribution of the current paper is to diagnose organizational culture by highlighting connections between orientations (task and relationship) and metaphors. Task and relationship orientations are suitable for the research of organizational culture as they highlight the most general aspects in social groups. Metaphors make it possible to capture the mutual interaction between the individual and the organization by mediating peoples’ ideas and thoughts about its culture. It has been shown that estimations of both orientations are related to which metaphor is being used to characterize the organization.