Summary:

New public management has in recent decades influenced the way public sector in western
countries has been organized. Major reforms have been implemented and forced leaders and
employees to change their way of thinking of, and perform services in the public sector. The
focus is now on a higher level of user orientation, efficiency and effectiveness, and so the
Norwegian welfare system has been reformed and changed considerably.
The thesis is concerning what impact the organizational culture has on the employee
collaboration when three public departments are merged. The three departments are
representing three public services such as employment services (Aetat), social security
(Trygd) and social welfare services (Sosialtjenesten).
We have in this thesis used organizational culture and institutional theory. Organizational
culture theory is used to emphasise the importance of universal values and common
understanding of the reality in the mind of organizational members. Institutional theory is
about how the organization works as a result of the behaviour of employees and the demands
from surroundings.
The study is a qualitative case-study, and the empirical findings come from 11 in-depth
interviews with employees from the case-office. Research in public documents was used in
addition to interviews, to better understand the intentions of the reform. The empirical
findings were linked up to the theoretical basis of the study.
The findings showed that it seemed that it`s “Aetats” organizational culture that`s the
dominant in the office, and slowly, by collaborating with employees from all departments, the
employees from “Trygd” and “Sosialtjenesten”, accepts and implements “Aetats”
organizational culture as their own. The leader’s background and working experience seemed
to have an effect on which context that was set as a standard in organizing the office, and
what values that were appreciated.
The results of the study showed that a challenge for the cooperation is how the office is
organized, and choosing between a generalist model where everyone has some competence in
every subject, or to choose a model where the employees are specialists in their field. From
starting with a generalist model it seems as the organization more and more are heading
toward a specialist model.