Organizational culture in school an ethnographic case study of Sekolah Menengah Manir, Kuala Terengganu

Abstract

This study was specifically done to help the school principal, teachers, parents and students of Sekolah Menengah Manir, to understand and to discover the nature of their existing culture and for teachers to compare their existing culture with that of their preferred culture. For that purpose, the researcher decided to do a case study on the mentioned school. A random sample of 76 teachers, the school principal and 13 of its supporting staffs (clerks, laboratory assistants and the school gardeners) were given a questionnaire on diagnosing the school culture. The instrument was an adaptation of Roger Harrisons (1994) questionnaire on diagnosing organizational culture. The findings revealed that there were slight variations between the male and female teachers ranking of the existing culture. The male teachers ranking for their existing culture were in the following order: Support, Achievement, Role and Power culture. On the other hand the female teachers ranking were Role, Achievement, Support and Power. However, the researcher felt that the variance found was not significant enough to be debated. The possible explanation for the variance would be the difference in gender perceptions on the situations they faced. However, the rankings for their preferred culture seemed to be unanimously agreed upon with Power culture as the most preferred culture, followed by role culture, support culture and Achievement as the least preferred culture. A preference for Power culture simply means that there was high dependence for trust, empathy and personal communication for its effectiveness. Organizational members prefer few rules and little need for bureaucratic procedures. Besides surveys, observations and interviews were also conducted to strengthen the findings. As a whole, the researcher felt that the use of qualitative methods of assessing school culture was most suitable since the fundamental content of culture was unconscious and highly subjective. Thus, it requires an interactive probing to access otherwise inaccessible and unconscious cultural material. Finally, each culture is idiosyncratic and unique and requires a non standardized assessments. From the observations and interviews, the weak culture, as identified, proved to be an eye opener to the principal, teachers, supporting staffs, parents and students that an appropriate measures need to be taken to match existing culture to that of organizational members preferred culture.