農業経営組織の変革における組織文化の役割

<p>Recently, Japanese agricultural corporations face many difficulties as they attempt to promote management reform, such as technological innovation, a change from being a family business to an organizational business, cultural changes surrounding farmers and their communities, industrial growth, business diversification, modernization of products and services, and internationalization. These corporations find that it is important to change not only their business structure but also their organizational culture, which may lead to sharing a mind-set of adapting to changes in modern markets and technology. However, our review of existing literature reveals that there has been limited empirical research on agriculture corporations in terms of their organizational culture. Based on the Competing Values Framework (CVF) which suggests four main cultural types -- hierarchical culture, market culture, clan culture and adhocracy (or innovative) culture -- current managerial reforms in modern agricultural corporations seem to indicate a shift from traditional clan culture to market and innovative cultures.</p><p>Major parts of previous research have suggested that when organizational culture is strongly shared within an organization, ] it facilitates excellent coordination and communication and provides efficient performance. But agricultural corporations are different from major business organizations as they tend to be social corporations rather than profit seeking organizations; that is they are small medium sized, family owned businesses that embedded in the local community. However, existing research on organizational culture has focused on large-scale organizations and multi-national businesses. Thus, research on organizational culture in agriculture corporations may need to focus on these differences in order to explore the uniqueness of their culture and the special conditions of their cultural transformation.</p><p>We propose that future research into organizational culture in agricultural corporations should be further developed along the following four points: First, we should find out the most dominant culture profile for the agricultural corporations by using the competing values framework (CVF), or some similar framework that analyzes effective organizational culture in agriculture; Second, we should explore why organizational culture change is needed in agricultural corporations by investigating the possible fundamental incompatibility between performance and business environment; Third, it is necessary to analyze agricultural corporations from a multi-level approach, not a single case or single level approach; Fourth, researchers had better engage in culture research on agricultural corporations as social enterprises, because of their social mission.</p>