Effect of organizational culture on creating learned helplessness attributions in R&D professionals: A canonical correlation analysis

Abstract

Organizations must make effective use of their resources in order to succeed in today’s global marketplace. To get the most out of their human resources, organizations empower employees to allow them to work to their highest potential. In doing so, firms are attempting to make employees aware that there is a link between their efforts and subsequent performance. In other words, employers are making employees responsible for their behaviour and then rewarding those who show signs of the most appropriate behaviour; however, these strategies will not work with all employees. One specific reason, empowerment may not work, is because some individuals exhibit learned helplessness behaviours. Due to such negative impact of learned helplessness attributions on performance in organizations, it is important to understand how people develop learned helplessness attributions and what role organizational culture plays towards developing or helping to cope up with such negative way of thinking which essentially impairs the performance of individuals. Learned helplessness as a deed per se is highly influenced by the philosophical foundations, value systems, and ethos of the organization and therefore the basic premise of the study is that the organizational culture is one of the fundamental causes of creating learned helplessness attributions. In this paper, an attempt has been made to explore the relationship among different dimensions of organizational culture and learned helplessness attributions for R&D professionals of pharmaceutical industry of India. Different strategies to manage R&D professionals have been suggested based on the results. The study revealed that: • the organizational culture variables were negatively related to the learned helplessness attributions • the role of organizational culture was significant in order to create or remove learned helplessness • the attributions played an important role in causing depression and vulnerability situations that eventually results in learned helplessness • all learned helplessness attributions were quite closely related and created a well-defined dimension for representing LH attributions • the outcome dimension of learned helplessness was fairly well predicted by the set of organizational culture profile variables when acting as a set • learned helplessness was brought on by a handful of uncontrollable, stress-creating factors including time and performance pressures, lack of free time, the competitive and demanding nature of research projects, and lack of opportunity to socialize or engage in recreation.