Published Article / The political and social transformation process in South Africa is forcing organisations to avoid the sensitive, unpleasant and potentially volatile behaviour at workplace that can arise when groups or individuals who differ work together or come into close contact with each other. Therefore, management developed a corporate culture which creates an environment that is conducive to performance improvement, shapes the way people act and interact, as a result, this culture influences how things get done. The corporate culture encompasses the organisation's goals, business ethics and dominant ideologies. Based on the results of this study, these cultural changes ought to be driven by the fact that employees respond to the way in which the organisation treats them. The research aims to investigate the impact of organisational culture on the gold mining activities. The impact of organisational culture is demonstrated through a sense of identity and unity of purpose by the members of the organisation, commitment of employees to their work and existence of strategies and programmes which provide guidance on what is expected. The premise is that organisational culture determines socialisation, power relationship, policies and procedures, reward systems, communication systems and ideology, all of which have a significant impact on the day to day experiences of all employees.

This research exposed some of the factors that affected organisational culture and group behaviour in Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) from its inception in 2007 through to 2014, when it became a Bespoke Trading Entity. The factors that were examined included organisationally legitimised personal, social and geographic identity, and linguistic difference and group size. Metaphor was also used by group members to describe the relationship they had with their groups. Group size was another factor that affected group behaviour. Finally, the effects of socio-technical induction and socio-cultural integration were seen to be additional factors that allowed cultural drag to occur within DE&S. The research was an insider ethnographic study that used a qualitative, multi-factorial approach which encompassed 6 years of observations, 124 interviews, and included the analysis of appropriate DE&S policy documents. This thesis is considered to be unique because no research of this nature, or at this level, has been carried out in DE&S, the Defence Procurement Agency (DPA) and the Defence Logistics Organisation (DLO). In addition, no studies have investigated the organisational culture of DE&S, apart from Kirke (2007a unpublished), Kirke (2010), which was a published article that was informed by that pilot study. The factors that were identified combined to produce both an organisation that possessed multiple organisational cultures and one single ethos which was that of delivering equipment to troops and supporting the troops, described as ‘front-line-first’. There was also an organisational culture that was affected by both the socio-technical and socio-cultural interactions of its members and of unconscious behaviours. All of those factors acted together as a system of interactions, with different factors taking primacy depending on the organisational context, no single factor being consistently more important than any other. The ethos of “front-line-first” was embedded within the DE&S organisational culture as a value which may have been used as a metaphor for the primacy of the overarching organisational culture of supporting the front-line.

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The primary aim of this thesis is to put forward what is believed to be an original conceptualisation of culture relevant to understanding organisational change. There are essentially two interrelated areas of research. The first is an explanation of organisational culture. In this, I seek to show what organisational culture is, how it develops, how it is perpetuated and how it is represented. The second is the application of this concept of culture to the management of change. Here I seek to show the effects of culture on organisational change and how an understanding of it is necessary to achieve this. The conscious and unconscious processes of culture are researched from a psycho-dynamic perspective. Relying on a mixture of personal reflection and psychoanalytic theory concepts of organisation, boundaries, symbolism, learning, socialisation and creativity are put forward as background data which supports an original explanation and understanding of organisational culture. This knowledge is then applied to the management of change: first in a theoretical manner and then to an action research project in the Metropolitan Police Service. The psycho-dynamic model provides the necessary ability to examine the transference and counter-transference within the relationship between consultant and clients. The role of consultant is also viewed in regard to power and ethics. By providing what is considered to be an original conceptualisation of culture, the main contribution to knowledge is to the theory of organisations and the management of change. There are also specific contributions in the application of psychoanalytic theory of symbolism to organisations, and what is considered to be an original conceptualisation of creativity.

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Relative Performance Evaluation "RPE" is a performance evaluation and reward scheme which have been receiving a growing attention from academic and professionals (Holmstrom 1982, Frederickson 1992, Conyon and Gregg 1994, and Defond & Park 1999). Under RPE rewards for managers and executives are set upon their performance compared to that of their peers. Holmstrom (1982) introduced the basic model of RPE founded on agent-principal assumptions. In that model, the peers' performance was seen to provide information about the agent's unobservable effort. Fredrickson (1992) suggested that RPE could satisfy economic and psychological needs of employee. In this study, an attempt is made to depart from the universal agency perspective and to adopt a contingent framework. The research arguments were developed from an identification of the discrepancies and gaps in the literature of RPE, overlooked complications and issues in the UK practice, relating the debate about RPE to the wider accounting literature of performance measurements and evaluation (Emmanuel et.al. 1990, Kaplan & Atkinson 1998). The aim of this research was to explore the content and context of RPE therefore, the arguments focused on: whether RPE is motivating, the impacts of difficulty of peer group, non financial measures, market measures and varying the form of the rewards on RPE. Case study approach was adopted to examine the research arguments. Data were collected from three companies in Egypt and one company in England. Access was partially accidental but turned to provide four different cases. Three cases were developed in Egypt including: Trade (a public company), Dairy (private company) and Steel (joint venture) and the English company was United Utilities (private company). Data were collected by questionnaire, interviews and other documentary sources of the companies. The research findings suggest associations between RPE and target's difficulty, using non financial but not varying rewards. Competition and type of ownership and the organisational culture were influential on RPE.

This research exposed some of the factors that affected organisational culture and group behaviour in Defence Equipment and Support (DE&S) from its inception in 2007 through to 2014, when it became a Bespoke Trading Entity. The factors that were examined included organisationally legitimised personal, social and geographic identity, and linguistic difference and group size. Metaphor was also used by group members to describe the relationship they had with their groups. Group size was another factor that affected group behaviour. Finally, the effects of socio-technical induction and socio-cultural integration were seen to be additional factors that allowed cultural drag to occur within DE&S. The research was an insider ethnographic study that used a qualitative, multi-factorial approach which encompassed 6 years of observations, 124 interviews, and included the analysis of appropriate DE&S policy documents. This thesis is considered to be unique because no research of this nature, or at this level, has been carried out in DE&S, the Defence Procurement Agency (DPA) and the Defence Logistics Organisation (DLO). In addition, no studies have investigated the organisational culture of DE&S, apart from Kirke (2007a unpublished), Kirke (2010), which was a published article that was informed by that pilot study. The factors that were identified combined to produce both an organisation that possessed multiple organisational cultures and one single ethos which was that of delivering equipment to troops and supporting the troops, described as ‘front-line-first’. There was also an organisational culture that was affected by both the socio-technical and socio-cultural interactions of its members and of unconscious behaviours. All of those factors acted together as a system of interactions, with different factors taking primacy depending on the organisational context, no single factor being consistently more important than any other. The ethos of “front-line-first” was embedded within the DE&S organisational culture as a value which may have been used as a metaphor for the primacy of the overarching organisational culture of supporting the front-line.

Bibliography: p. 213-220. / Organization science is not a new discipline. However, it persistently attracts many researchers to explore new concepts for coping with the increasing complexity in our society. The exploration is in transition, from mechanistic doctrine to systemic and humanistic notions. The mechanistic view is still prevailing and playing a dominant role, but, owing to its increasing critics, appeals for renovation of mechanistic principle incessantly arise. The tendency induces diversified approaches for intervening in the situation of bureaucratic context. This research investigates the features of organization from three angles - on the one hand, the structure and process (functional) aspects, and on the other, the purposeful behaviour of humans. Many works see the three components as separate, and deal with them accordingly. However, we contend that the three aspects are interrelated and that they should be integrated. The integration suggests that multiple views of organization are adequate because it embodies the attributes of purposeful behaviour and functional characteristics. Problems within an organization can be seen as the mutual influence of these parts. They can mutually aggravate and impede the performance of an organization. On the one hand, we contend that bureaucratic organization is inadequate, owing to its fragility in functional components of processing information to adapt to environment change. On the other hand, its rigid essence causes an inability to deal with human dimension problems. The problematical elements present a systemic relation. In turn, we attempt to explore the essence of organization's complex problems. The exploration concludes that both complexity and problems are cognitive phenomena. The illustrations suggest that the unearthing of organization problems should be grounded in the 'interaction' and 'consensus' 'model interchanging' of stakeholders. Based on this idea, we propose an intervention framework for diagnosing pathological pattern within bureaucratic organization. The framework is applied to one of South Africa's biggest local governments (the City of Tygerberg). The research result shows that the most significant problem within the City of Tygerberg is in the information-processing subsystem- associator. Besides, the 'mental pathology' locates on the 'sink' stage of the structured problem model.

The present study aimed to explore employee images of organisational culture within a South African organisation. In order to investigate the aim of the present study, the following research question was put forward. What, if any, insights do the images elicited from the employees provide about the culture of the organisation. The present study is classified as a qualitative, non-experimental, and an ex-post facto design. A sample of seven employees from the organisation was interviewed using an explorative technique, which made use of metaphors. The results of the present study indicated that the case study organisation’s culture could be assessed and accessed by means of metaphorical language.