Corporate culture and innovative performance of the firm

It has been observed that performance gaps exist between organizations with almost identical formal organizational structures. This has led to the assumption that cultural differences between organizations may be responsible for these performance gaps. A review of the literature on success factors for innovations reveals that a profound empirical study analyzing the relationship between corporate culture and innovative performance on the firm level is lacking to date. Based on a typology suggested in the literature for measuring corporate culture, a contingency framework is derived to test the relationship between four types of corporate cultures and innovative performance while taking the firm's strategy and its competitive environment into account. In order to test the validity of the suggested typology to measure corporate culture, a multiple informant approach is used. Respondents with different hierarchical and functional positions in 43 organizations are analyzed by means of multi-trait multimethod analyses. It is shown that a severe informant bias reduces the validity of results significantly. This has an impact on the attempt to quantitatively measure corporate culture as well as on assessing the relationship between types of corporate culture and innovative performance.