The Current and preferred organisational culture of Lithuanian community pharmacies

Abstract

Background. Organisational culture is a pattern of shared beliefs in an organisation. Organisational culture is the element that can predispose an organisation to either success or failure, therefore it is of interest of to understand it. So far, there have not been any research into the organisational culture of Lithuanian pharmacies. The aim of this study was to design and validate a questionnaire to measure organisational culture in pharmacies in Lithuania. Methods. The adapted Competing Values Questionnaire with an included ten-point Likert scale was chosen as an instrument to measure organisational culture.The survey consisted of 24 questions and was designed to measure both present and preferred culture. Based on the Competing Values Framework four culture types are distinguished: clan, adhocracy, market and hierarchy. 78 questionnaires were handed out to pharmacy specialists and 56 were completed correctly (71.8% responsiveness). Microsoft Excel was used to perform data analysis. Results. The obtained results revealed that the most prevalent culture among Lithuanian pharmacists was hierarchy with a median score of 7.1/10. The least common was clan culture (5,46/10). These results are in contrast with the findings of G. Rogers1. A recent study performed by G. Rogers in the USA revealed that the culture in community pharmacies are clan-like. The analysed questionnaires also showed that Lithuanian pharmacists prefer a clan culture in their workplace compared to the current situation in Lithuanian pharmacies. Conclusions and future work. The prevailing organisational culture of Lithuanian pharmacies is hierarchical. However, employees in Lithuanian pharmacies reported that the culture of a clan would be preferred. There are emerging evidences that the culture of a pharmacy could have an impact on other outcomes such as job satisfaction and patient safety2,3. The objective of future research is to use this pilot study to evaluate the correlation between or