Analysing the Bottom-Up Approach to Develop Organisational Culture in Virtualised Organisations

Due to the processes of the virtualisation of work, organisations are facing profound transformations which are also changing their organisational culture. The mainstream academic literature defines organisational culture in terms of shared meaning i.e., patterns of belief, symbolism, rituals, and mythology, which evolve and function as a source of cohesion for an organisation (Glaser et al. Management Communication Quarterly 1(2):173–198, 1987). Therefore, it argues that organisational culture develops within organisations through a top-down approach (Shepherd and Sutcliffe. The Academy of Management Review 36(2):361–380, 2011). However, as emerging technologies and the virtualisation of work have brought about substantial change (Großer and Baumöl. International Journal of Information Systems and Project Management 5(4):21–35, 2022), it is necessary to redefine the concept of organisational culture. Considering the different approaches to organisational culture, the present research aims at analysing how it is formulated within virtualised organisations (Atkinson and Sohn. TESOL Quarterly 47, 2013) that have several peculiarities both in terms of organisational designs and soft competencies (Autor et al. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 118(4):1279–1333, 2003; Autor. The changing task composition of the US Labor Market: An update of Autor, Levy, and Murnane (2003)—David Autor. ScholarSite, Inc., 2013; Grundke et al. Which skills for the digital era? Returns to skills analysis. OECD, 2018; Bissola et al. Journal of Product Innovation Management 31, 2014). Despite the increasing prevalence, this aspect has received little attention within academia. We will analyse the bottom-up perspective through the lenses of Socio-technical and Complexity theories (Bednar and Welch. Information Systems Frontiers 22(2):281–298, 2020; Kuhn. 9. The essential tension: Tradition and innovation in scientific research. In The essential tension. University of Chicago Press, pp 225–239. 2011; Bauman. Liquid modernity. Polity, 2000), as well as compare academic and grey literature to highlight the need for a change in the mainstream approach to organizational culture.