Organizational Culture and Subcultures in the Spanish Nuclear Industry

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 

Thanks for giving me the opportunity to read this interesting paper.

Comments:

• Lines 223-224 “Such methodology has been used continuously in all Spanish nuclear facilities since the year 2000”. NPP 3 and 4 seems to be more represented: 1. Did the responders answer to the OCI questionnaire several times between 2007 and 2019?  2. If yes it could have been interesting to observe the evolution of subcultures over the time. 3. Did the authors take into consideration potential impacts on the context on the results: Issues of 2007 are certainly not the same as those in 2019. 4. Anyway these issues request more methodological explanations.

• Line 261 + figure 2 line 309: the reviewer notes that the OCI model is strongly normative. Socially accepted behaviors are mainly concentrated within the “constructive culture”, less within “Passive/Defensive” and even less within “Aggressive/Defensive” (except for the “perfectionist” issue). This is also broadly in line with the results presented line 312 (figure 3). Did the authors take into consideration the potential impacts of the normative nature of the model on results.
• Line 375: “There are no differences in any of the three OCI organizational cultures by contractual relationship in NPP”. More particularly regarding this result, and according to the experience of the reviewer, it is surprising that no cultural differences appear within contractors which are from different organizations with different management practices, facing different issues…
• Lines 366 and following: “If only NPP are considered (Table 6a), the statistical analysis shows very compact results within the Constructive organizational culture” + Line 375: “There are no differences in any of the three OCI organizational cultures by contractual relationship in NPP".

The understanding of the reviewer is that the Spanish nuclear world and, especially, the NPPs are quite homogeneous regarding organizational culture. As a main comment, the reviewer is wondering if we can really talk about subcultures. The paper showed indeed different traits of a culture that seems to be shared by a large set of organization, location, organizational components… According to the relevant Martin’s typology another way to interpret the results of this study is, surprisingly, more related to the integration perspective.

This point could/should be addressed within the discussion part.

 

Minor comments:

• line 45: "complementarity of the approaches". I understand the point of view of the authors but the diversity of approaches regarding culture within these disciplines calls for prudence regarding the actual complementarity of the approaches. In addition, diversity of definitions is highlighted lines 54-55.
• line 65: "occupational quality of life" = work life quality ?
• line 544: As another limitation the organizational components identified by Mintzberg and in particular "Operating Core" does not allow to distinguish differences between departments. We can expect some different subcultures between, e.g. Operation (production) and maintenance.

Typo:

• line 211: "pubic companies" è to be replaced by public

• line 231-32: “As shown in Table 1, a total of seven organizations are analyzed, four of them ... are?

Author Response

Please see attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The subject of this article is very interesting and the authors explained well the organizational culture of the nuclear industry in Spain based on the survey results.  It seems that the methodology applied in this paper is appropriated. The article is understandable but it is too lengthy, so more concise manuscript is recommended.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf