ASSESSMENT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE PRACTICE: THE CASE OF ETHIOPIAN RAILWAYS CORPORATION

Abstract

The study was planned to assess the Organizational Culture at Ethiopian Railways Corporation. There are a number of organizational culture dimensions, for this study innovative culture, aggressive culture, outcome oriented culture, stable culture, people oriented culture, team oriented culture and attention to detail culture are selected. To achieve the previously announced objective, study data were collected from employees of the Corporation who are working at Head Quarter and Addis Ababa Light Rail Transit (AALRT) by way of structured questionnaire. The validity of the developed questionnaire was tested by communicating with the advisor and to measure its reliability Cronbach Alpha were applied. Total number of target population was 1600 out of which 200 were determined to be sample respondents. From the distributed 200 questionnaire 90% (180) were collected and out of those collected only 173 were successfully filled and returned to the researcher, the rest 7 were incomplete or entirely not filled. Descriptive statistics and frequencies were applied to analyze the data and mean and percentage are used to interpret the data collected. The findings of the study show that though employees are expected to in accordance with the instructions given from their supervisors, the Corporation as a company is behind in building attention to the detail culture. The Corporation in general is good in team oriented culture, as the response implies most respondents have agreed that there is team oriented culture. Therefore, team oriented culture is a dominant culture of the Corporation. But in the Corporation modeling those who work in team is not practiced. As the response indicated employee turnover is relatively low when compared to other companies. This is a golden opportunity for the Corporation has to build the intended culture and enhance productivity and innovation. The Corporation has to consider its employees as valuable asset. Hence, the researcher generally recommends, Ethiopian Railways Corporation has to stress on productivity, innovation, cooperation and work discipline.