Analyzing the bottom-up approach to develop organizational culture in virtualized organizations

Due to the processes of the virtualisation of work, organisations are facing profound transformations which are also changing their organisational culture. The mainstream academic literature defines organisational culture in terms of shared meaning i.e. patterns of belief, symbolism, rituals, and mythology, which evolve and functions as a source of cohesion for an organisation [1]. Therefore, it argues that organisational culture develops within organisations through a top-down approach [2]. However, as emerging technologies and the virtualisation of work have brought about substantial change [3], it is necessary to redefine the concept of organisational culture. Considering the different approaches to organisational culture, the present research aims at analysing how it is formulated within virtualised organisations [4] that have several peculiarities both in terms of organisational designs and soft competencies [5-6-7-8]. Despite the increasing prevalence, this aspect has received little attention within academia. We will analyse the bottom-up perspective through the lenses of Socio-technical and Complexity theories [9-10-11], as well as compare academic and grey literature to highlight the need for a change in the mainstream approach to organizational culture.