Individual and Occupational Differences in Perceived Organisational Culture of a Central Hospital in Vietnam

Many hospitals in developing countries, including Vietnam, are facing the challenges of increasingly noncommunicable diseases and the financial autonomy policy from the government. To adapt to this new context requires understanding and changing the current organisational culture of the hospitals. However, little has been known about this in resource-constrained healthcare settings. The objectives of this study were to examine the four characteristics of the organisational culture and test selected individual and occupational differences in the organisational culture of a Vietnam central hospital. In a cross-sectional study using the Organisation Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) with the Competing Value Framework (CVF), including 4 factors, Clan, Adhocracy, Hierarchy, and Market, health workers currently working at Quang Nam General Hospital were interviewed. The results indicated the current cultural model was more internally focused with two dominant cultures, Clan and Hierarchy, while, for the desired model, the Clan culture was the most expected one. Comparing between the current and desired pattern, the down trend was found for all types of culture, except the Clan culture, and there were significant differences by domains of organisational culture. Furthermore, the current and desired models were differently distributed by key individual characteristics. These differences have raised a number of interesting directions for future research. They also suggest that, to build a hospital organisational culture to suit both current and future contexts as per employees' assessment and expectation, it is important to take individual and institutional variations into account.