Journal of Applied Sociology

1-14

Authors: Fereydon Vahida, Mohammad Esmaeel Ansari, Mansour Haghighatian, Mahnaz Bazmi

Introduction: Sociologists believe the existence of corporations is necessary for society so that different roles can be assigned to people, facilitating social interactions and transactions. These roles help people control their social action and leads to relational cooperation. On the other hand, studies on culture are very significant in sociology, in which culture can be seen as a social pattern in society, involving values and believes, which produce a commonsense that leads to stability in social system. Numerous definitions are provided for culture, but one agreed definition comes from Habermas approach, in which culture is seen as a combination of beliefs and values under the name of common knowledge. Organizational culture (OC) includes the combination of patterns that direct staff behavior in organization and motivate their action for goal achievement. One of the important issues in organizational studies is OC, because it is identified as a key factor in organizational success. As a collection of assumptions that determines organizational values and norms, OC also helps in defining organizational goals. Different cultural, social and historical factors can impact OC, and OC itself can impact staff performance, creativity, job satisfaction and commitment. So recognizing the factors that impact OC is important because it has a great deal of influence on organizational outputs. Job alienation is one of the important factors that can impact OC. It leads to conflict between actions and value. In this research, OC is based on Denison model which divides it into 4 component: involvement, adaptation, mission, and integration. Using this model, the present study aims at explaining the impact of job alienation on organizational culture among educational staffs of Mashhad Country in 2013. Methods & Materials: This is a survey study with descriptive and explanatory elements. Research instrument includes Denison's (2008) questionnaire of organizational culture and Seaman's (1991) questionnaire of job alienation. Research population is consisted of all employees at Mashhad's Organization of Education, of whom a sample of 285 individuals were selected using stratified random sampling method. Discussion of Results & Conclusions: According to structural equations and goodness of fit statistics, the conceptual model of the study is meaningful. The greatest impact of job alienation is on adaptability component with =-0/30. The most important component of organizational culture is also adaptability with factor loading of 0/81. Output of LISREL shows that the relationship between job alienation and organizational culture is meaningful. Likewise, both path analysis and factor analysis demonstrate that a meaningful relationship exist between job alienation and organizational culture in the sense that if sentiments of job alienation decrease the grades of organizational culture increase. Keywords: Organizational Culture, Job Alienation, Educational Organization.