This doctoral dissertation research examines organizational culture from the property rights perspective and aims to develop and empirically test a framework that predicts the relationship between contextual constraints and the emergent control systems in the organization on the one hand, and the influence of these constraints and controls on group norms within the organization, on the other. The scope of this study is limited to the verification of (a) the relationship between contextual constraints and property rights at the individual level, (b) the relationship between constraints, rights and ``within group'' norms.