Keywords Corporate culture, Public administration, Bureaucracy, Organizational change Abstract This paper analyzes how public administration may improve the service it offers to citizens through a suitable organizational culture; for this purpose, it starts by studying the specific features of the culture of public administration.
In this line of thought, we agree with Maynard-Moody et al.
Then, it describes the problems of bureaucratic culture, typical of many public agencies, and briefly describes the features of a public service, citizen-oriented culture.
The results of these analyses in private, or even in stateowned corporations, are only partly applicable concerning methodology and the study of shared values.
(1976) came to the conclusion that public organizations have less autonomy and flexibility at decision making than private corporations.
All these subdivisions make it a complex task to study the characteristics, role and changes in organizational culture in public administration from a general point of view.
(4) Public service or public interest culture model.
Furthermore, should this not be enough, within these agencies independent bodies operate; for example, within a local administration there exists a police department, a fire brigade, council rates collection, sports, town planning departments, etc.
Finally, it proposes a specific methodology for the modification of a bureaucratic culture into a culture based on the notion of serving the citizen, together with an analysis of when modification is necessary.
In this respect, it analyzes the existing taxonomies in public administration, the role of culture in these agencies and how a diagnosis of such culture is made.
Characteristics of organizational culture and its feasibility in public administration The first issue that we must clarify is that public administration of each country has a number of specific features as regards ``the way things are done'', which differs from one country to another.
A high quality service is sought.
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emerald-library.com IJPSM 12,5 456 Despite all these peculiarities, it is possible to analyse how to improve working habits and the results of different public administrations by approaching the culture of these bodies.
It reduces the risk in projects where a specific public body intervenes alongside with other public or private organizations.