Promoting Industrial Success through Organizational Culture; An Israeli Case Study

This study shows the value of promoting organizational culture by identifying and analyzing factors of economic success in a particular factory. The research was conducted by qualitative investigation using ethnographic interviews and document analysis procedures. The findings describe how the managers merged socialist traditions of the pre-privatized kibbutz and the capitalism of the global market in order to create a dynamic strategic model. The components of the model interacted with each other, creating an unusual organizational culture and a porous boundary between the factory and the kibbutz community that owned it. The findings suggest that there are advantages to preserving the unique cultural attributes that link workers, managers and their surrounding community which reflect their roots and basic mindset. This case study offers managers of kibbutz, and non-kibbutz, factories a successful example of combining opposite trends in management style. The main contribution of this study is presenting an alternative method for examining kibbutz industries in future research. This alternative method describes a managerial culture that facilitates the combination of two seemingly contradictory paradigms. The first is the kibbutz's socialist, cooperative, and communal principles. The second paradigm is the external capitalist realities of the domestic and global market.