What Culture Assessments Should Capture
The history of organisational culture measurement suggests that no single method or approach provides a complete account of organisational culture.[i] Typologies provide accessible descriptions
of organisational character, dimensional models provide analytical resolution, and psychometric instruments provide a degree of measurement discipline. Qualitative approaches may provide access to meanings, histories and informal practices that structured questionnaires can struggle to capture. Unfortunally, they can in be influenced by researcher perceptions and subconcious biases.
The question, therefore, is not simply which existing model is most appropriate. It is whether the underlying assumptions of conventional culture assessment are sufficient for the purposes for which organisations now seek to understand and manage culture.[ii]
This requires returning to a more fundamental question, namely what an organisation wants when it asks about its culture.
A useful culture assessment should do more than classify an organisation or produce a set of scores. It should help explain the pattern of behaviour and expectations that people experience, the forces that sustain that pattern, and the implications of the patterns on how the organisation functions.
Culture is a pattern, not simply a category
One of the attractions of typological models is their ability to reduce complexity. An organisation are sometimes described as a “Clan,” “Hierarchy,”[iii] “Task culture” or “Networked culture”, The label provides an immediate point of reference.
The difficulty is that organisations are rarely pure examples of a single cultural type. Different parts, even levels, of the organisation can exhibit different combinations of the characteristics. Culture may be better understood as a configuration of characteristics than as membership of a single category.
Culture is also not uniform throughout an organisation. An organisation-wide culture score can be useful, but it can also conceal substantial internal differences. An overall average may suggest moderate trust, but that average describes neither group particularly well. Subcultures are not necessarily evidence of a dysfunctional organisation. They can reflect legitimate differences in work, expertise and operating environments. Unfortunately, these are sometimes simply attributed to leadership or management styles
Two organisations may both be described as “innovative,” where one achieves innovation through autonomy and experimentation and another through highly disciplined project management. The shared label conceals an important difference in how the culture operates. This distinction is important because configurations can contain tensions that categorical models tend to suppress.
A culture assessment should therefore retain sufficient dimensional information to reveal the pattern and relationships among cultural characteristics, rather than reducing the organisation prematurely to a single type.
Distinguish between characteristics and their combinations
The assumption that cultural characteristics operate independently is another potential limitation. In practice, the significance of one characteristic may depend on the presence of another.
For example, autonomy may produce very different outcomes in an organisation characterised by high trust than in one characterised by low trust. Strong performance expectations may operate differently where employees also experience high levels of support and involvement. Formal procedures may provide useful coordination where decision-making is otherwise ambiguous but may become restrictive when combined with low tolerance for deviation.
The implication is that the interaction among cultural characteristics can be as important as the characteristics themselves.
Culture comprises both behaviour and values
Organisations routinely publish values. The existence of these statements does not establish that they constitute the organisation’s culture.
Schein’s distinction between artefacts, espoused values and underlying basic assumptions is particularly relevant here.[iv] What an organisation says about itself is not necessarily the same as what its members experience in everyday organisational life.
For culture assessment, this creates a fundamental distinction between what the organisation says it values and what people learn they need to do to succeed within it. The latter may be more revealing. They should examine behavioural expectations and organisational practices,[v]
Culture is the relationship between people and the organisation
Culture is experienced by individuals, but it is not simply an aggregate of individual attitudes. People encounter culture through the organisation’s structures, leadership, processes, language, rewards, informal networks and everyday interactions. A useful assessment therefore needs to consider the relationship between the individual and the organisational environment.
Formal organisation charts also only tell a part of the story. In one organisation, decisions may generally follow formal reporting lines. In another, authority may move toward whoever possesses the relevant expertise. In a third, formal authority may exist on paper but informal networks may determine what actually happens. This suggests that the distribution and exercise of authority is an important cultural characteristic in its own right.
Understanding these helps explain why two organisations with apparently similar formal structures can operate very differently.
Organisational relationship with uncertainty
Different organisations respond to uncertainty in markedly different ways. Some respond by increasing control, standardisation and predictability. Others respond by experimenting, decentralising decisions and allowing greater variation. Still others attempt to maintain stability in core activities while creating protected spaces for experimentation. These are not merely differences in “innovation culture”; they represent different ways of dealing with uncertainty and risk. The ways and ability of dealing with uncertainty and risk are often linked to industry and levels of seniority.
This is one reason why adaptability has appeared repeatedly in organisational culture research, including Denison’s model[vi] and the work of Kotter and Heskett.[vii] A culture assessment that measures innovation without considering the surrounding relationship with uncertainty may therefore produce an incomplete picture.
Cohesion versus conformity
Two organisations with a high degree of agreement among employees are sometimes referred to as having a strong or healthy culture. But agreement can have different meanings.
In one case it may indicate shared purpose and social cohesion. In another it might be pressure to conform and fear of consequences. The distinction is consequential. An organisation may have a highly coherent culture while simultaneously being poorly equipped to question its assumptions.
This reinforces Kotter and Heskett’s distinction between cultural strength and adaptability. The presence of shared assumptions is not sufficient evidence that those assumptions continue to serve the organisation.
Culture assessment should therefore consider not only how strongly people share a pattern, but also whether the pattern permits challenge, learning and adaptation.
Current versus desired culture
Most organisational culture interventions eventually encounter the question of what the organisation wants its culture to become. The distinction is useful, but it needs to be handled carefully.
A desired culture is not necessarily an objectively superior culture. It represents what people believe would be more appropriate, effective or desirable given their circumstances.
This means that the gap between current and desired culture can be treated as diagnostic information rather than a simple performance gap.
Unpublished research – by the author – indicates that among executives the overarching “ideal” culture, even in large bureaucracies, is most often the one found in entrepreneurial organisations.
The reality is that culture cannot be assessed independently of organisational context. There is no universal cultural configuration that is appropriate for every organisation. Even within the same organisation, different functions may require different emphases.
Consequently, the relevant question is not what the ideal culture is but what cultural configuration is appropriate for this organisation and the environment in which it operates.
This shifts culture assessment from a search for ideal scores toward an examination of cultural fit with organisational purpose and context.
Culture is part of an organisational system
Culture does not exist independently of organisational design. Psychology has made it clear that people adapt their behaviour to the systems within which they work. This suggests that culture assessment should be connected to the organisational mechanisms that reproduce behaviour.
This has a major impact on culture change interventions. An organisation cannot simply instruct employees to behave differently while leaving the systems that reinforce the existing behaviour unchanged.
For culture change, three questions must be answered
- What patterns of behaviour, expectations and organisational practice are currently experienced? This question is primarily descriptive.
- What organisational conditions, assumptions and reinforcing mechanisms are sustaining those patterns? This question is diagnostic.
- Which cultural characteristics, behaviours or organisational conditions need to change to support the organisation’s purpose and strategy? This last question is where development starts.
Many culture assessments are relatively strong at the first question. Some provide useful information for the second. Far fewer provide a clear bridge between the assessment and the third.
That bridge is where the practical value of culture measurement is ultimately determined.
From cultural categories to cultural configurations
Taken together, these requirements suggest a different way of conceptualising organisational culture.Rather than viewing culture as a single type or description, culture must be understood as a set of interrelated characteristics and components.
An organisation’s cultural identity emerges from the relationship among multiple characteristics. The same characteristic can also have different implications depending on what accompanies it. It cannot be seen simply as a set of components and must be viewed as a dynamic system. Cultural characteristics influence behaviour. Behaviour produces organisational experiences. Those experiences reinforce assumptions about what is normal and acceptable. Over time, those assumptions influence leadership behaviour, recruitment, promotion and organisational design.
This is an important departure from the assumption that culture can be adequately understood by asking whether specific dimensions are simply high or low.
Simplified, it might even be represented as: Leadership and organisational systems → behavioural expectations → everyday behaviour → shared experience → assumptions → reinforcement of organisational systems → Leadership behavour and style.
This is perhaps why cultures classify as autopoietic — a self-creating and self-maintaining system that produces and reproduces its own components and boundaries.
The assessment therefore has an important role in identifying where the cultural system is reinforcing itself.
The purpose of a culture assessment
The methodological history reviewed earlier suggests that culture can be classified, dimensioned, profiled and interpreted in many ways. The next generation of culture assessment needs to address a broader requirement. It needs to answer:
What pattern of cultural characteristics currently shapes the organisation, how is that pattern experienced across different parts of the organisation, what organisational conditions sustain it, and how well does it support what the organisation needs to accomplish?
It does not necessarily require abandoning the useful insights contained in existing typologies or dimensions. Rather, it requires placing them within a broader perspective of culture—one that recognises culture as a pattern of interdependent characteristics embedded in organisational behaviour and systems.
[i] Vasyl Taras, Julie Rowney, and Piers Steel, “Half a Century of Measuring Culture: Review of Approaches, Challenges, and Limitations Based on the Analysis of 121 Instruments for Quantifying Culture,” Journal of International Management 15, no. 4 (2009): 357–73.
[ii] Jennifer A. Chatman and Charles A. O’Reilly, “Paradigm Lost: Reinvigorating the Study of Organizational Culture,” Research in Organizational Behavior 36 (2016): 199–224.
[iii] Kim S. Cameron and Robert E. Quinn, Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework, rev. ed. (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2006).
[iv] Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein, Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th ed. (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2017).
[v] Robert A. Cooke and Janet L. Szumal, “Measuring Normative Beliefs and Shared Behavioral Expectations in Organizations: The Reliability and Validity of the Organizational Culture Inventory,” Psychological Reports 72, no. 3_suppl (1993): 1299–1330.
[vi] Daniel R. Denison, Corporate Culture and Organizational Effectiveness (New York: Wiley, 1990).
[vii] John P. Kotter and James L. Heskett, Corporate Culture and Performance (New York: Free Press, 1992).
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