Integrated cultures, perceived managerial competencies and organisational performance:a Malaysian context

Understanding `culture' has become an essential mantra of organisational activities. Managers today are facing this challenge of how to bring about changes in the way they manage, leading to sustainability and growth of organisations. The magnitude of effectiveness relies greatly on managers' skills and competencies. Hence, this study takes on a new dimension of integrating a more complex contingency linkage of cultures and competencies of managers with corporate performance, in a Malaysian context. Little is known about the synthesis of using these two components from evidence of previous research. This gap is filled in this research by embarking on two phases of empirical study. A mixed methodology was employed to triangulate the two approaches (qualitative and quantitative). This method allows researcher to be more confident of their results, provides new ways of capturing a problem to balance with conventional data-collection methods as well as counter-balances strengths and weaknesses of one approach with another. The first phase using a case study method aimed to get a feel for the key issues before embarking on a survey, which is the second phase of the study. It involved two cases based on public listed companies in Malaysia using in-depth interview with managers. The interview results revealed characteristics of strong cultures, variations in Hofstede's four dimensional cultures and perceived managerial competencies required for managers. The second phase based on positivist approach using survey instrument to collect data from a sample of 276 managers. The survey was carried out to elicit data on the perception of managers gathered from ten public listed companies (five locally controlled and five multinationals) in relation to cultures and the competency level of managers. Results of the second phase indicate that cultures, using Hofstede's (1980,1990) classifications at both national and organisational perspectives, correlate significantly with managerial competencies and organisational performance. However, findings also revealed that companies having strong cultures as indicated by high consistency drawn from the perception of managers appear to have a profound impact on managerial competencies and were predictive of organisational performance. It is also interesting to note that the factorised components of key-value and hardwork; emotional involvement and build (ie. ability to build frameworks/models/forms on the basis of information) orientations; participative decision and interpersonal respect as well as work goals have significant influence over performance. Evidence from the case studies implied that these elements reflect culture strength of organisation and therefore, contribute to positive organisational performance. The congruent effect on organisational performance was more apparent between organisational culture and managerial competencies than cross-cultural construct. By establishing an empirical linkage between cultures, managerial competencies and performance, the research provides fresh support for human capital requirements in the Malaysian's public and private enterprises.