En case-studie av organisasjonskultur og kjønnsmangfold i barnehage

Abstract

The nursery sector has been in a huge development over the past 20 years. The kindergartens are female dominated and about 90 % of the employees in Norwegian kindergartens are women. Few places in our society have such big gender domination. Nevertheless today more and more kindergartens employ both men and women, and in our thesis we wish to examine the kindergarten culture in a gender perspective. Do we see any cultural differences or similarities when the staffs are homogeneous or they represent gender diversity? We have completed a case study in witch we use a mapping tool called Organizational Cultural Assessment Instrument (OCAI), to provide new knowledge about organizational culture in kindergartens. In our study we have detected organizational culture all together, and the only difference were if the staff represented gender diversity or not. The mapping shows that the organization culture in kindergartens are characterized by a social and cooperation focused environment (fig. 6). Men and women answer mostly similar in their description of the kindergarten culture, but men seems to represent a counterweight to the cooperation environment (fig. 9). However, we see at big gap in culture perception when we compare every case with and without gender diversity (fig. 7, 8). The differences are biggest in the adhocracy and hierarchy culture. The kindergartens with staff of gender diversity perceive the organizational culture as less control orientated and more innovative regarding to creativity and possibilities. Our culture analysis shows that there are especially differences in women’s cultural perspective (fig. 10.) Women in kindergartens with gender diversity describe another organizational culture with adhocracy and less control (fig. 12). The homogeneous kindergarten is represented with an intimate and control culture, and they are internal focused. In the work with our issue we analysed some preferably cultural profiles (fig. 13, 14, 15). They shows that the differences we´ve spotted earlier are increasing. This can make a huge impact in the future. Gender diversity in kindergartens seems to have positive synergies, and we see that gender diversity can be an important issue to address considering the quality debate in kindergartens. In our study, we see some indications that gender diversity in organizations can cause the children, the staff and the whole organization development to benefit from it.