Current Organizational Culture Research Articles

Examination of the current and idel organisational culture and leadership elements at the municipalities of the North Great Plain region

The connection between organizational culture and leadership has been examined by several researchers (Schein, Schmircik, Bass) and it is proven that there is a link between them. The leader shapes the organizational culture and at the same time the organizational culture shapes the leader too. The middle managers of local governments place the major emphasis on the dimension of goal orientation for the future. From the leadership perspective they find charismatic, goal and team oriented leadership necessary for the future.
 The local governments have to answer the challenges of the rapidly changing environment. Quick responses and adjustments are only possible if the leader possesses a clear future vision and not only sets short-term goals but plans for the future and estimates the necessities on the long run. It is important to have a leadership with utmost dedication to the organization and to the objectives of the organization. The leaders must raise the interests of the employees, involve them in the process of setting goals and in finding ways to meet those goals, and that the employees should no longer strive to realize their own personal ambitions but focus on the common objectives. This brought transformational leadership to light.
 The leader establishes and shapes the organizational culture but the individuals and teams working for the organization have impact on the organizational culture as well. This becomes apparent in the organizational culture as middle managers would place the major emphasis on performance orientation. Performance orientation is a dominant motivation based on excellence, hard work, pre-calculated risk, fore planning, goal orientation and regular feedback, which shapes the leadership too, as the leader has to change as well, in order to run the organization.
 Scheins’ standpoint reflects the best the relationship between the organizational culture and the leadership. Schein claims that organizational culture and leadership are interwoven phenomena, as the leader shapes the culture but after a while the organizational culture itself shapes the leader too.

The Organizational Culture Audit: Countering Cultural Ambiguity in the Service Context

Development of a compelling organizational culture continues to be an imperative for organizations seeking a competitive advantage. Identifying culture deficiencies or gaps is an important step in creating such a culture. For culture development efforts to be successful, leaders must first know the reality of the current organizational culture, however assessing the organizations’ true culture may be more complicated than it appears. Several theoretical frameworks illustrate how highly committed mangers may have difficulty in this regard. The following study links theory with application providing an action research based model of culture assessment. First, the rationale and conceptual model of cultural analysis is provided based on past research. Next, a five-step model analyzing ten cultural areas is proposed, and recommendations are provided for implementation.

Culture Change for Effective Engineering Asset Management Organizations

Using the competing values framework (CVF) as an organizational culture lens, this study analyses current organizational cultures and identifies strategies and actions for effective change in Austr...

Working at the nexus between public health policy, practice and research. Dynamics of knowledge sharing in The Netherlands.

BackgroundJoining the domains of practice, research and policy is an important aspect of boosting the quality performance required to tackle complex public health problems. “Joining domains” implies a departure from the linear and technocratic knowledge-translation approach. Integrating the practice, research and policy triangle means knowing its elements, appreciating the barriers, identifying possible cooperation strategies and studying strategy effectiveness under specified conditions.This article examines the dynamic process of developing an Academic Collaborative Centre for Public Health in the Netherlands, with the objective of achieving that the three domains of policy, practice and research become working partners on an equal footing.MethodAn interpretative hermeneutic approach was used to interpret the phenomenon of collaboration at the nexus between the three domains. The project was explicitly grounded in current organizational culture and routines, applied to nexus action. In the process of examination, we used both quantitative (e.g. records) and qualitative data (e.g., interviews and observations). The data were interpreted using the Actor-Network, Institutional Re-Design and Blurring the Boundaries theories.ResultsResults show commitment at strategic level. At the tactical level, however, managers were inclined to prioritize daily routine, while the policy domain remained absent. At the operational level, practitioners learned to do PhD research in real-life practice and researchers became acquainted with problems of practice and policy, resulting in new research initiatives.ConclusionWe conclude that working at the nexus is an ongoing process of formation and reformation. Strategies based on Institutional Re-Design theories in particular might help to more actively stimulate managers’ involvement to establish mutually supportive networks.

Organizational Culture in an Academic Health Center

Implementing cultural change and aligning organizational cultures could enhance innovation, quality, safety, and job satisfaction. The authors conducted this mixed-methods study to assess academic physician-scientists' perceptions of the current and preferred future organizational culture at a university medical school and its partner health system. In October 2010, the authors surveyed academic physicians and scientists jointly employed by the University of Oxford and its local, major partner health system. The survey included the U.S. Veterans Affairs Administration's 14-item Competing Values Framework instrument and two extra items prompting respondents to identify their substantive employer and to provide any additional open-ended comments. Of 436 academic physicians and scientists, 170 (39%) responded. Of these, 69 (41%) provided open-ended comments. Dominant hierarchical culture, moderate rational and team cultures, and underdeveloped entrepreneurial culture characterized the health system culture profile. The university profile was more balanced, with strong rational and entrepreneurial cultures, and moderate-to-strong hierarchical and team cultures. The preferred future culture (within five years) would emphasize team and entrepreneurial cultures and-to a lesser degree-rational culture, and would deemphasize hierarchical culture. Whereas the university and the health system currently have distinct organizational cultures, academic physicians and scientists would prefer the same type of culture across the two organizations so that both could more successfully pursue the shared mission of academic medicine. Further research should explore strengthening the validity and reliability of the organizational culture instrument for academic medicine and building an evidence base of effective culture change strategies and interventions.

Agile methods and organizational culture: reflections about cultural levels

AbstractAgile methods emerge as an alternative to improve quality and performance in software development processes. However, as agile methods are essentially focused on human aspects, their application in companies depends mostly on their adequacy to the current organizational culture. This study explores the view of the organizational culture in three levels as a theoretical framework to allow early detection of problems, which could jeopardize the adoption of agile methods by a company. This article points out that many facilitators or obstacles to the adoption of an agile method can be hidden in the lower levels of the organizational culture. Additionally, the article shows that a superficial analysis of those issues can lead to a miscomprehension about the possibility of applying an agile method in a software company. This article also evidences that the interpretation of the levels of organizational culture improves the understanding of how an agile culture should be established. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keeping the Fire Burning: The Evolution of a University–District Collaboration to Develop Leaders for Second-Order Change

A university and a large urban district began collaborating in 2003 to intensify and customize the preparation of principals. District leadership viewed the principal as the keystone to improving academic achievement for all students. The university and district reciprocally collaborated on the design and implementation of this principal preparation program. From 2005, a case study research design consisting of document review, surveys, interviews, and observations has provided ongoing data for program development and district information. The experiences of the new leaders have informed both systems of their current organizational cultures and the barriers and levers for second-order change.

Imagining a transformed UNESCO with learning at its core

This paper argues that key aspects of UNESCO's organizational culture are a major impediment to the realization of its important educational agenda. Drawing upon sustained observations over a four-year period, the paper describes the nature and consequences of UNESCO's highly ritualized and ‘inward-oriented’ work activities, especially the weak links between what happens at Headquarters and the realities on the ground in formal and non-formal educational frameworks worldwide. By establishing a more open, interactive and egalitarian organizational milieu, focused on collaborative learning and knowledge creation, accumulation and dissemination, this paper argues that these linkages can be tightened. A genuine learning-oriented culture at UNESCO would encourage professional empowerment, independent thinking, human resource development, greater dialogue and critical debate, and the creation and dissemination of quality publications. Thus, for UNESCO to regain its leadership role in the education world and effectively serve as a broker of innovative ideas and effective programs, it must overcome the stultifying tendencies of its current organizational culture and find ways to develop dynamic learning cultures both from without and from within.

Future Leaders’ Views on Organizational Culture

Research libraries will continue to be affected by rapid and transformative changes in information technology and the networked environment for the foreseeable future. The pace and direction of these changes will profoundly challenge libraries and their staffs to respond effectively. This paper presents the results of a survey that was designed to discern the perceptions and preferences of future library leaders related to organizational cultures in these times of precipitous change. The study finds that future leaders of academic libraries perceive a significant gap between their current and preferred organizational cultures and that current organizational cultures limit their effectiveness.

Women, Men, and Leadership: Exploring the Gender Gap at the Top

AbstractElite‐level leaders in business and government make significant and far‐reaching decisions influencing many facets of society. However, relatively few of these powerful positions are held by women. This article explores gender in leadership by focusing on the difficulties women experience in attaining and being seen as effective in top leadership positions. It begins by revealing the lack of parity between the sexes in leadership and in the remaining sections it addresses empirical research that serves to illuminate the leadership labyrinth, or obstacles to women’s progress, also known as the glass ceiling. In the first section, research on gender and leadership styles, traits, and effectiveness is reviewed followed by a consideration of how both domestic responsibilities and current organizational cultures differentially impact women and men on their journey to top leadership positions. The focus then shifts to examining how stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination contribute to women’s under‐representation in elite leadership roles by both impacting perceptions of and responses to women as well as impacting the experiences of women themselves. The final section concludes with thoughts on promoting parity in top‐level leadership.

Organisational Values in Higher Education: Perceptions and Preferences of Staff

In this paper, staff members’ perceptions about the organisational culture are measured. The questions addressed are: what are their opinions about the current and preferred organisational culture? Are there differences between the current and preferred situation? Do the perceptions differ per department? The Organisational Culture Assessment Instrument was sent to staff involved in 18 different departments within Dutch universities of applied science. The results demonstrated that both a flexibility‐ and control‐oriented culture were moderately experienced in practice. In addition, significant differences were found between the current and preferred situation as well as a significant variation over departments for the current situation. Staff members in general, prefer a flexibility‐oriented culture to a control‐oriented culture. These findings imply that the organisational culture in many departments is not yet fully in line with the staff members’ preferences.

Agile methods and organizational culture: reflections about cultural levels

Agile methods emerge as an alternative to improve quality and performance in software development processes. However, as agile methods are essentially focused on human aspects, their application in companies depends mostly on their adequacy to the current organizational culture. This study explores the view of the organizational culture in three levels as a theoretical framework to allow early detection of problems, which could jeopardize the adoption of agile methods by a company. This article points out that many facilitators or obstacles to the adoption of an agile method can be hidden in the lower levels of the organizational culture. Additionally, the article shows that a superficial analysis of those issues can lead to a miscomprehension about the possibility of applying an agile method in a software company. This article also evidences that the interpretation of the levels of organizational culture improves the understanding of how an agile culture should be established. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The futures of policing African states

The current organizational arrangements, cultures, and practices of policing in Sub‐Saharan African states, and likely future developments to more democratic forms of policing, are constrained by persistent patterns of political instability, pervasive insecurity, identity‐based and often quite violent conflicts, corruption, vast class and status distinctions among the rich and the poor, weak civic society organizations, and a withdrawing from the state into survival activities by much of the population. Unless these social contexts change, through international pressures and assistance programs and sustainable domestic political and economic reforms, the efforts of progressive police leaders are not likely to move policing in Africa toward more democratic forms.

Creating a Safety Culture Through the Application of Reliability Science

The discussion of patient safety in delivering healthcare services is an important topic given the current state of the healthcare system. The current organizational cultures of many healthcare organizations do not support a culture of patient safety and do not employ a specific framework in delivering safe, reliable patient care. This article discusses the principles of reliability science and the use of these principles in creating a culture of patient safety. Recommendations are made for nursing involvement in creating a change in healthcare organization culture, and implementation steps are presented for nurse managers who are interested in applying the principles of reliability science to create a culture of patient safety on their units.

Institute of Medicine, Congress Seek Solutions to FDA's Safety Woes Through Reform, Funding

An Institute of Medicine report has identified gaping holes in the ability of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to ensure the safety of new drugs, but experts say the proposals don’t solve possibly the biggest obstacle to safer drugs: inadequate funding. The IOM’s Committee on the Assessment of the U.S. Drug Safety System released their preliminary fi ndings in September, after a series of public meetings held over 15 months. The report contains recommendations for reforming the center within FDA that is responsible primarily for both drug approval and postmarketing safety monitoring. “Underlying our 25 recommendations is the fundamental view that the interests of the public are best served when safety and effi cacy are considered together. However, factors including, but not limited to, the current organizational culture of the Center for Drug Evaluation and Research (CDER), combined with severe resource constraints and a problematic funding mechanism, have impeded the development of a system that optimally integrates the safety and effi cacy assessments along a drug’s life cycle, particularly with regard to safety issues arising postmarketing,” the committee states in the report. Another factor is a lack of consistent leadership at the top of the agency, ac cording to the committee’s chair, Sheila Burke, R.N. “The committee believes that turnover and instability in the commissioner’s offi ce leave the agency without effective leadership or the potential to emphasize safety as having high priority in the work of the agency,” she testifi ed before the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pension Committee in November. The Senate re cently confi rmed former National Cancer Institute chief Andrew von Eschenbach, M.D., as FDA’s permanent director. He has been acting head of the agency since September 2005 when Lester Crawford, D.V.M., stepped down 2 months after being confi rmed. “Without stable leadership strongly and visibly committed to drug safety, all other efforts to improve the effectiveness of the agency or position it effectively for the future will be seriously, if not fatally, compromised,” she continued. The report recommends that the center

From Learning to Education

In the 1990s, community colleges underwent a shift in their guiding paradigm. The transformation in norms, roles, and values took place in the name of “learning,” as the change was driven by the goal of turning 2-year schools into “learning colleges.” In this article, it is suggested that the shift ushered in by the learning movement limited the focus of community colleges to goals that are narrowly private and psychological. An alternative to current organizational culture is proposed: an “education” paradigm that widens institutional focus to include goals consistent with serving social and public purposes.

Changing times: understanding social workers' motivation to be field instructors.

Renewing the profession of social work is historically dependent on social work practitioners volunteering to be field educators for students placed in their agencies. During the past decade, with massive funding cuts to social and health services and changes in professional practice, the availability of field instructors has been threatened. This article reports on social workers' motivations to become field instructors. The findings from qualitative interviews with 20 social workers randomly selected from a range of field agencies indicate that current organizational culture has a powerful influence on social workers' motivations to volunteer to become field instructors. The implications of this shift are discussed in relation to rejuvenating the profession of social work. Collaboration among organizations, professional associations, and schools of social work at the local and national level is critical.

Nuestra Tierra: A University/Public School Technology Integration Project

This article describes a two-year university/public school project to integrate technology with teaching and learning in a Southwest border school district. The research began by asking, “What would happen if teachers were fully supported in integrating technology in their classrooms; if the curriculum was culturally relevant and meaningful to students; and if the computer was used as a constructivist tool rather than an electronic workbook?” The article describes how goals were developed in alignment with these questions and how the project was collaboratively designed, implemented, and evaluated by university faculty and public school teachers and administrators. Findings demonstrated the potential of university researchers working closely with teachers in classrooms as related to changes in teaching strategies and student learning. The authors also suggest several barriers to technology integration in classrooms that may result from the current organizational structure and culture of schooling.

"Reinventing" Government: Does Leadership Make the Difference?

What makes management reform or reinvention successful? The operating principle of the Clinton-Gore reinvention model for changing the federal bureaucracy is that an organization's culture is a major determinant of organizational performance. The Clinton-Gore model was operationalized in 1993 when President Clinton announced, Our goal is to make the entire federal both less expensive and more efficient, and to change the culture of our national bureaucracy away from and entitlement toward initiative and empowerment (Gore, 1993, 1. Emphasis added.) This article examines leadership as the most significant variable that affects the operating principle underlying the Clinton-Gore reinvention model of management reform. Inability to change the culture has been identified as the most serious obstacle to change in the federal (Kettl, 1994; Carroll, 1995; Carroll and Lynn, 1996) and simultaneously criticized as too simplistic and unrealistic in its approach (DiIulio, Garvey, and Kettl, 1993; DiIulio, 1994; Moe, 1994). While this article assumes, along with Wilson (1989), Barzelay (1992), and many others, that organizational culture does affect organizational performance, it examines what a leader does in a specific type of organizational change. From the clearly defined role of leaders in public sector organizations described by Robert Denhardt (1993) to the broadly applicable examples of the role of the leader in the private sector collected by Hesselbein, Goldsmith, and Beckhard (1996), the argument has been made clearly and strongly that leaders have a tremendous effect on individual organizations and on the performance of those organizations. The key question for empirical validation of those intuitions appears to be, How can any observable effects of leadership on organizational culture and performance be identified and recorded? This article approaches the issue of evidence by offering empirical observations organized around the four competencies of leadership developed by Bennis (1993) as the independent variable, organizational culture as the intervening variable, and two measures of reinvention, the dependent variable. The two measures used are National Performance Review (NPR) implementation and organizational performance. The observations lead to the conclusion that the most effective leaders foster, support, and sustain organizational cultures that facilitate the type of management reform envisioned by reinventing government and the attendant increases in effectiveness and efficiency. Reinvention Is a Major Initiative of the Clinton Administration Reinvention as a type of executive management reform remains a major initiative of the Clinton administration. The reinvention effort was launched in 1993 by the work of 200+ members of the federal bureaucracy who prepared and published, under the leadership of Vice President Gore, the NPR. The review identified specific and general changes required to improve efficiency and effectiveness in each executive department and agency. It also provided the philosophical basis for those changes--changing the current organizational culture, described by the President as one of complacency and entitlement, (Gore, 1993, 1), to one of initiative and empowerment. The National Performance Review asserts that organizational culture plays a large role in bringing about improvements in efficiency and effectiveness. Although few recommendations of the review specifically address organizational culture, most assume changes in organizational culture once implemented. The purpose of the first phase of this research was to test the Clinton-Gore model relationship between organizational performance and organizational culture explicit in the President's 1993 statement. If such a relationship exists, how does organizational culture contribute to a that works better and costs less? The first phase found a strong relationship between organizational culture and performance, but many ambiguities remained. …

Private selves and shared meanings: Or forgive us our projections as we forgive those who project into us

This paper explores the difficulty university counselling services experience in finding common purpose with their institutions at the present time. It draws on a review of the relevant literature and personal experience to argue that it is extremely difficult to sustain depressive-position functioning in the current organizational culture, which, the author suggests, is dominated by fears about survival. The paper examines some defensive strategies counsellors may use to protect themselves against prevailing anxieties and argues for the importance of recognizing and working with these.