Abstract

Culture of organizations has received increasing attention in recent years. The questions that remain unanswered are however: what are the dominant cultural values of architectural firms and which characteristics of the firms determined the dominant culture of firms? To answer these questions, we carried out a survey of 92 architectural firms in Nigeria. The factor which best described the cultural values of the firms was innovation and staff orientation dimension, while the factor which least described the cultural values of the firms was the business- orientation dimension. The cultural value dimensions were explained by factors both internal and external to the firms. The results show that the age, size and legal ownership form of the firms were the firm characteristics which determined the dominant cultural values of the firms. The leadership style of the principal was also a major cultural value determinant. This suggests that each firm may need to adapt cultural values to their unique characteristics. The value of this study lies in its empirical nature in investigating the dominant cultural values of architectural firms, an area that hitherto had received little attention from scholars.