A study on OCTAPACE culture

FORE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT
A study on OCTAPACE culture of
Accenture
Accenture Culture and Beliefs
Submitted by
Kali Prasad Pandey 212013
Vageesh Kumar 212038
Yugank Dutt 202073
Sanjay Garg 192035
UNDER THE SUPERVISION AND GUIDANCE OF
Dr. Ajoy Kumar Day
In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree of MASTER OF BUSINESS
ADMINSTRATION
Submitted to FORE SCHOLL OF MANAGEMENT

1
Executive Summary
Over the past three decades ‘Human Resource’ has impinged upon several segments of
society and diverse organizations. Past research studies reveal that the congenial
OCTAPACE culture is extremely important for promoting the organizational effectiveness
and good Governance. In this context, the present paper is an endeavour to identify the major
factors responsible for non-promoting of organizational effectiveness among the managerial
and non-employees about the prevailing OCTAPACE culture and to know the preventive
measures for the same with special reference to Services Sector
Our aim was to carry out profiling of the organizational culture of Accenture. Accenture is a
global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company, with
approximately 266,000 people spread over more than 120 countries.
We have taken personal interviews on basis of OCTAPACE questionnaire of 40 employee of
Accenture of Gurgaon branch of Managers, Leads and Executives out of various sub
functions including Finance, IT, HR and Technical.
After performing the factor analysis and T-Test we found they have and entrepreneurial
culture which supports openness. It was also found that their values of trust and confrontation
were not equally supported by beliefs. This is the area where Accenture needs to improve
upon.

2
Contents
INTRODUCTION.......................................................................................................................................4
OCTAPACE APPROACH TO STUDY ORGANIZATION CULTURE.................................................................4
 Openness: ...................................................................................................................................4
 Confrontation:.............................................................................................................................4
 Trust:...........................................................................................................................................4
 Pro-Activeness: ...........................................................................................................................4
 Autonomy: ..................................................................................................................................4
 Collaboration:..............................................................................................................................5
 Experimentation: ........................................................................................................................5
Background .............................................................................................................................................5
Implementation of OCTAPACE Culture at Accenture .............................................................................6
Research Objectives............................................................................................................................6
Research Methodology Hypotheses...................................................................................................6
Null Hypotheses (H0): .....................................................................................................................6
Alternative Hypotheses (H1):..........................................................................................................6
Sampling Design......................................................................................................................................7
Design of the Study.................................................................................................................................7
Data Collection:.......................................................................................................................................7
Data Analysis and Results: ......................................................................................................................8
Initial T Test Results: ...........................................................................................................................8
Null Hypotheses (H0): .....................................................................................................................8
Alternative Hypotheses (H1):..........................................................................................................8
Test of Reliability:....................................................................................................................................9
ROTATED COMPONENTS PLOT .........................................................................................................11

3
ROTATED COMPONENTS PLOT MODIFIED........................................................................................12
Limitations: .......................................................................................................................................13
Conclusion:............................................................................................................................................13
Summary:..........................................................................................................................................13
Recommendation:.............................................................................................................................13
Appendices............................................................................................................................................14
Appendix A: Correlation Matrix........................................................................................................14
Appendix B: Anti-Image Matrix.........................................................................................................16
Appendix C: Component Matrix .......................................................................................................16
Appendix D: Rotated Component Matrix a
.......................................................................................17
Bibliography:.........................................................................................................................................17

4
INTRODUCTION
Modern organizations have grown many folds in defining techniques to study and improve their
functioning. Organization culture is an aspect that impacts every organization’s functioning.
Different kinds of organizations need a different kind of culture to be setup. For example in an R&D
company the culture must support innovation where as in an Army the culture must support
authority and power.
Organizational culture is defined in terms of shared meanings - patterns of beliefs, rituals, symbols,
and myths that evolve over time, serving to reduce human variability and control and shape
employee behaviour in organizations - Peters & Waterman (1982)
Keeping in view the vital role that culture play in the success of any organization, the present study
was undertaken with the objective share the organization culture in Accenture India Ltd. This study
is based on the concept of OCTAPACE culture - an acronym for Openness, Confrontation, Trust,
Authenticity, Pro action, Autonomy, Collaboration and Experimentation
OCTAPACE APPROACH TO STUDY ORGANIZATION CULTURE
OCTAPACE gives us an eight dimensional look towards organizational culture. It measures
the culture of an organization in terms of
 Openness: Freedom to communicate.
 Confrontation: Facing the problems.
 Trust: Maintaining confidentiality of information shared among the company.
 Authenticity: Doing what is said.
 Pro-Activeness: Taking initiatives and advanced planning.
 Autonomy: Freedom of acting and planning at one’s own level.

5
 Collaboration: Team work.
 Experimentation: Trying out new and innovative methods of work.
Background
“The only thing of real importance that leaders do is to create and manage culture. If you do
not manage culture, it manages you, and you may not even be aware of the extent to which
this is happening. If you have been trying to make changes in how your organization works,
you need to find out how the existing culture aids or hinders you. We tend to think we can
separate strategy from culture, but we fail to notice that in most organizations strategic
thinking is deeply collared by tacit assumptions about who they are and what their mission is.
In most organizational change efforts, it is much easier to draw on the strengths of the culture
than to overcome the constraints by changing the culture.” -- Edgar Schein, professor MIT
Sloan School of Management.
As quoted above knowing the existing culture of an organization is a critical step in planning
the future strategies. In another similar piece of text by John Kotter & James Heskett,
Harvard Business School, Corporate Culture and Performance, they have written “We found

6
that firms with cultures that emphasized all the key managerial constituencies (customers,
stockholders, and employees) and leadership from managers at all levels outperformed firms
that did not have those cultural traits by a huge margin.” This clearly stating that the actual
culture of an organization is different from the culture projected through policies and vision
statements of the organizations. To study the actual difference we need some tools like
OCTAPACE.
Implementation of OCTAPACE Culture at Accenture
We chronicle OCTAPACE culture implementation at Accenture. The organization is one of
the most professionally managed companies with the most efficient centre in its category in
Gurgaon, using technology, Consulting & Outsourcing. Their main service is the first choice
of the customers and it has been continuously bettering its performance delivered in all
aspects of business.
Research Objectives
 To compare the culture of Accenture on terms of the eight factors of OCTAPACE
 To enlist a few recommendations based on the study for Accenture which could help
on the areas to work upon in future.
Research Methodology Hypotheses
Our Hypotheses for the present study has 5% significance level=1.96
Null Hypotheses (H0): There is no significant difference in OCTAPACE culture
values and beliefs of Accenture.
Alternative Hypotheses (H1): There is a significant difference in OCTAPACE
culture values and beliefs of Accenture.
For initial study a two tailed-paired-sample T test is conducted. Paired T test is used
because both means reflect the values and beliefs of the same subjects.
In the second step a Factor Analysis will be conducted to extract some components to
explain the relation between values and beliefs of Accenture.

7
Sampling Design
Subjects of the present study are selected from the Gurgaon office of Accenture. A total
of 40 employees are selected and the age of the employees is between 26 – 32 years. The
sample includes managers and executives in a ratio of 1:3. The selection was done with
convenience sampling method as there was a limitation in availability of Accenture
employees due to their busy schedule.
The study is conducted with the help of a standard OCTAPACE questionnaire. The
questionnaire consists of 40 questions in total divided into 2 sections of value
dimensions (first 24) and belief dimensions (next 16). In values there are 3 questions for
each of the 8 values of OCTAPACE and similarly in beliefs 2 questions for each of the 8
beliefs of OCTAPACE. The scale of each dimension is kept simple and divided into 4
levels (High value- 4, Fairly High value-3, Low value-2, Very low value-1) to analyze the
effectiveness of OCTAPACE culture values on the beliefs.
Design of the Study
The present study is comparative in nature. The main objective of the study is to examine
& compare the correlation between OCTAPACE culture values and beliefs. The
OCTAPACE instrument gives us the capability to measure various dimensions of values
and beliefs of the organization’s employees. This in turns provides us with two sets of
data, one for values and the other for beliefs. Our aim is to try and find out the level of
correlation between the two and explain the variation in the two.
Data Collection:
The OCTAPACE Questionnaire was circulated by hand/email in the Gurgaon office of
Accenture. The participants filled the questionnaire and then sent the responses. These
responses were then entered in an excel sheet and the initial operations i.e. averaging was
done. Later this data was entered into SPSS data section.

8
Data Analysis and Results:
Initial T Test Results:
The T Test results are shown below:
Null Hypotheses (H0): There is no significant difference in OCTAPACE culture
values and beliefs of Accenture.
Alternative Hypotheses (H1): There is a significant difference in OCTAPACE
culture values and beliefs of Accenture.
Paired Samples Test
Paired Differences t df Sig.
(2-
tailed
)
Mean Std.
Deviati
on
Std.
Erro
r
Mean
95%
Confidence
Interval of
the
Difference
Lowe
r
Uppe
r
Pair
1
Value_openness -
Belief_openness
.2475
0
.80032 .1265
4
-
.0084
5
.5034
5
1.956 39 .058
Pair
2
Value_confrontat
ion -
Belief_confrontat
ion
.3525
0
.92819 .1467
6
.0556
5
.6493
5
2.402 39 .021
Pair
3
Value_trust -
Belief_trust
.3475
0
.77757 .1229
4
.0988
2
.5961
8
2.826 39 .007
Pair
4
Value_authenticit
y -
Belief_authenticit
y
.2400
0
.78994 .1249
0
-
.0126
3
.4926
3
1.922 39 .062
Pair
5
Value_proaction
-
Belief_proaction
.1725
0
.79968 .1264
4
-
.0832
5
.4282
5
1.364 39 .180
Pair
6
Value_autonomy
-
Belief_autonomy
.2025
0
.82880 .1310
5
-
.0625
6
.4675
6
1.545 39 .130
Pair
7
Value_collaborati
on -
Belief_collaborat
ion
.0100
0
.82921 .1311
1
-
.2551
9
.2751
9
.076 39 .940

9
Pair
8
Value_experimen
tation -
Belief_experimen
tation
.0450
0
.65865 .1041
4
-
.1656
5
.2556
5
.432 39 .668
As seen in the results the p value is less that level of significance (.05) only in case of
Confrontation and Trust in these two cases the Null hypothesis is rejected that is there is a
significant difference between values and beliefs in these two factors. Rest all of the pairs
have a p value higher than level of significance (.05) signifying that Null hypothesis is
accepted that is there is no significant difference between the values and beliefs in all
these factors. In all the cases the mean of values is greater than that of beliefs. But this
difference is not alarming. It is less than 0.4 in all the cases. Yet Accenture should work
towards reducing this difference further and getting stronger beliefs of their values into
their employee culture.
Test of Reliability:
The Cronbach’s alpha has a value of .910 which is greater than 0.7. The results of the KMO
and Bartlett’s Test show that the data is reliable. The value of KMO Measure of Sampling
Adequacy is 0.742 and the null hypothesis of Bartlett’s test is also rejected. The two extracted
components explain up to 56.53% of total variance. It is expected that all ‘Values’ will get
loaded on to one component and similarly all ‘Beliefs’ will get aligned to the other
component

10
Scree Plot:
The scree plot shows that the maximum variation is explained by the first factor with an
Eigen value of slightly above 7. The curve reaches below 1 mark at 6th
factor and starts
flattening up there after.

11
ROTATED COMPONENTS PLOT
The above plot is improved by excluding Value_Experimentation as it is a trouble causing
variable.

12
We can notice the improvement in the plot as follows:
ROTATED COMPONENTS PLOT MODIFIED
Now Values and beliefs are more clustered into their groups and less interfering with each
other. Thus these shows all the values get loaded to one component and the beliefs to the
other.

13
Limitations:
 The sampling technique used was convenience based.
 The data collected contained a mix of employees and managers where as there was no
specific element in research to compare the difference in the responses of the two
levels of hierarchy.
Conclusion:
Summary:
Accenture rates high in all 8 dimensions except for Belief authenticity which is
comparatively lower in their case. They have and entrepreneurial culture which supports
openness. In the T-Test it is shown that their differences in the means of most of the
dimensions are very less but slightly greater in case of trust and confrontation which depict
restrictiveness in the culture.
Recommendation:
They should work into making their beliefs stronger in the future. As the correlation between
values and beliefs of Trust and Confrontation dimensions turn out to be slightly less, we
recommend Accenture to work over their trust and confrontation dimensions.

14
Appendices
Appendix A: Correlation Matrix

16
Appendix B: Anti-Image Matrix
Appendix C: Component Matrix
Component Matrix
a
Component
1 2
Value_trust .840 -.279
Value_confrontation .792 -.308

17
Value_autonomy .782 -.457
Value_proaction .762 -.424
Belief_experimentation .748 .409
Belief_collaboration .726 .381
Value_experimentation .690 .140
Value_authenticity .665 -.366
Value_openness .642 -.287
Belief_autonomy .624 .421
Belief_openness .613 .347
Belief_proaction .592 .116
Value_collaboration .499 -.400
Belief_trust .478 .387
Belief_authenticity .388 .242
Belief_confrontation .524 .542
Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.
a. 2 components extracted.
Appendix D: Rotated Component Matrix a
Rotated Component Matrix
a
Component
1 2
Value_autonomy .885 .192
Value_proaction .848 .202
Value_trust .808 .361
Value_confrontation .792 .307
Value_authenticity .737 .179
Value_openness .668 .222
Value_collaboration .638
Belief_experimentation .275 .807
Belief_collaboration .279 .771
Belief_confrontation .754
Belief_autonomy .176 .732
Belief_openness .218 .670
Belief_trust .609
Value_experimentation .414 .569
Belief_proaction .359 .485
Belief_authenticity .123 .441
Extraction Method: Principal Component Analysis.
Rotation Method: Varimax with Kaiser Normalization.
a
a. Rotation converged in 3 iterations.
Bibliography:
Business Research Methods (Donald R Cooper)
Business Research Methods (William G. Zikmund) Ebook
Business Research Methods (Alan Bryman ) Ebook

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