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F. William Brown: College of Business, Montana State University, Bozeman, USA
Nancy G. Dodd: College of Business, Montana State University, Bozeman, USA
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: Received December 1997 Revised July 1998
Introduction
Some of the most venerable studies about the nature of managerial work have been those which have described managerial work as being characterized by "brevity, variety, and discontinuity" (Mintzberg, 1975), a world which Peter Vaill (1989) has metaphorically, but quite aptly, dubbed "permanent white water." Working leader/managers often seem at risk of being crushed by the bewildering complexity and multiplicity of demands which present themselves for attention and action. Often the advice they receive from consultants or the highly transitory conventional wisdom provided by the management literature seems confusing and conflicted. On one hand managers may receive demands for increased control or standardization of process, while simultaneously being encouraged to relinquish traditional executive decision making authority and to push it further down into the interstices of the organization.
This is a study of the efficacy of the use of the Competing Values Framework (CVF) as described by Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1981, 1983) to determine human resource development needs. This paper reports on a project undertaken to assess the current state of an organizational culture and to compare that assessment to a desired future state. An analysis of the gap, if any, between current and future states is used to determine the particular human skills which need to be developed and activated to move the organization from where it is presently toward a desired future. The primary objective of the study is to determine the extent to which the CVF in general, and the instant instrument in particular, is of value in making these determinations.
In an effort to resolve the apparent lack of agreement about effective responses to environmental and organizational complexity, Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) surveyed the existing leadership and organizational theory literature. Their analysis caused them to conclude that seemingly conflicting approaches could be unified in terms of a model which took into considerationtwo primary value dimensions or axes as illustrated in Figure 1. The horizontal axis accounts for two polar opposite concerns of organizational focus. The far right hand aspect reflects an exclusive concern for matters external to the organization and at...