ORGANISATIONAL CULTURE AND ORGANISATIONAL EFFECTIVENESS
: This paper reports a study which addressed the relationship between organisational effectiveness and two dimensions of organisational culture, both of which have been stressed in the prescriptions for and descriptions of successful private sector organisations. The study examined a number of public sector organisations to assess the extent to which the perceived degree of bureaucracy and the priority given to HRM in each organisation were associated with favourable perceptions of organisational effectiveness. The data for the study were obtained by two recent surveys of APS organisations. The first was a population survey of the SES of the APS, conducted by mailed questionnaire in mid-1989 (response rate of 52%). The second survey was of all staff in the 16 branches of a large Commonwealth agency (“Department X”), conducted in early 1989 (response rate of 87%). The data support the hypothesis that organisations which give high priority to the HRM function are likely to be more effective than those whose cultures give a low level of support to HRM. There is equivocal support to the hypothesis that organisations which are hierarchical in their working arrangements are less likely to be effective than those. which are relatively non-hierarchical. Most agencies surveyed apparently do not give high priority to the HRM function, particularly if the issue is asked of those at the lower levels of the organisation. This is explicable in terns of the relatively low value placed on “people” skills by senior executives. These results support those writers who argue that private sector models are relevant to the public sector.