Transforming Public Enterprise Organisational Culture in Developing Countries for Improved Performance: A Study of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and Shell Petroleum Development Company (SPDC)

Abstract

The last two decades till date have witnessed unrelenting efforts by governments of developed cum de-veloping countries aimed at reforming public sector organisations such as public enterprise (PE) with the goal of improving their performances. Unlike other reform strategies like privatization, deregulation, etc. that have been applied to public sector organisations with little or no success, this work championed the transformation of the organisational cultures of public enterprises in developing countries as a means of improving their performances.

Based on the assumption that performance is higher in private or privately owned enterprise (POE) than in public enterprise as a result of the superior organisational culture of the former, the researcher carried out a qualitative and comparative research hinged on intranational and inter-organisational contexts to decipher and ascertain the level of performance differentials between public and private enterprises by effectively using information from relevant printed materials, electronic source, etc. to bring to light the combination of cultural and other factors responsible for such performance differentials. For this purpose, this work focused on Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and Shell Petroleum Development Company of Nigeria (SPDC) since both organisations respectively exemplify public and private enterprises that operate similar business in the same environment; and thus proposed cultural reform measure aimed at improving the performances of public enterprises in developing countries.

The core findings of this work showed that in the arena of profit and loss account, private enterprise seemed to outperform public enterprise. But with regard to overall efficiency and accountability, the per-formance picture of public enterprise is not a completely dull one. This is as a result of the recognition that public enterprises in developing countries, apart from economic objectives, and the problem of mul-tiple principals are also saddled with social, political, security, strategic and ideological goals which are not amenable to most economic performance measurement tools. Consequently, the analysis demonstrated the need and ways to transform the organisational cultures of public enterprises in developing countries by synergizing the cultural orientations of some basic dimensions of organisational cultures more in favour of process, employee, parochial, open system, loose control and pragmatic cultural orientations to improve the performances of public enterprises in those countries in both commercial and noncommercial terms.