Business Process Management (BPM) plays an important role for maintaining efficiency and effectiveness of the operations of companies and organizations. The adoption of BPM is a very complex and time-consuming process that requires much effort, time, resources and discipline. Since BPM is a multidisciplinary concept, its success depends not only on different Downloaded by UNIVERSITY OF TOLEDO LIBRARIES At 09:26 07 February 2018 (PT) 2 factors, but likely also on their interaction. Organizational culture has been identified as one of the key factors for a successful BPM adoption (Rosemann and vom Brocke, 2010; vom Brocke and Sinnl, 2011; Alibabaei et al., 2010), but it is still widely under-researched in connection to BPM adoption (vom Brocke and Rosemann, 2014). Some BPM researchers agree that the organizational culture needs to be suitable for BPM adoption to succeed (Alibabaei et al., 2010; Schmiedel et al., 2014) and that its characteristics should be seen as predecessors for success of BPM projects (Bandara et al., 2009). More specifically, four key cultural values supporting BPM were identified in (Schmiedel et al., 2013), leading to the proposition that organizational culture should fit the characteristics of a BPM initiatives (Schmiedel et al., 2014). However, organizational culture cannot be changed in a short period of time (Grugulis and Wilkinson, 2002) and changing it into a desired direction is difficult (Lee and Dale, 1998). Therefore, it appears to be more promising to investigate options to customize the BPM adoption approach to the organizational culture. The aim of this paper is to derive propositions that explain in which circumstances a BPM initiative is more likely to be a success. To this end, we investigate the differences in BPM initiatives in connection with the organizational culture according to Competing Values Framework (CVF) culture types (Cameron and Quinn, 2006). In this way, we identify characteristics of BPM initiative that are favourable for its success. Our empirical basis is an explorative survey that we conducted with Slovenian, Croatian and Austrian companies that already have experience with BPM. The four main propositions that we identify complement prior research on BPM and organizational culture, such as (Hribar and Mendling, 2014), (Buh and Indihar Štemberger, 2016), Hernaus et al. (2016) and (Buh, 2016), with a more faceted view on the circumstances in which success emerges. The rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section 2 discusses the background of prior research on BPM adoption in connection to organizational culture. Section 3 presents our research design and our empirical data. Section 4 describes explorative data analysis and resulting propositions. Section 5 discusses the findings in connection of prior research and implications for research and practice before Section 6 concludes the paper.