Reviewed by Maria Falcone

The concept being measured in this section is organizational culture.  Organizational culture in this context refers to shared meanings, patterns of belief, symbols, rituals and myths that evolve over time, which function as the glue that holds the organization together.  It can also be referred to as shared expectations for consensually approved behavior.  Culture research focuses variously on the symbolic aspects of organizational life, myths, stories, legends and on socialization and rites of passage.

Structure

The instrument discussed in this section is known as the Organizational Culture Survey (OCS).  It is a standardized survey questionnaire.  You can add a triangulation approach with the use of the OCS by employing reliably coded interviews along with the survey.  These critical incident interviews help to interpret and place the results of the statistical analyses in context. 

The OCS can be used to examine six components of organizational culture, grounded in both management and communication research.  They include; teamwork-conflict, climate-morale, information flow, involvement, supervision and meetings.  These six categories can be studied with the OCS and are helpful because they are central to any construction of organizational culture; around which rituals develop and stories evolve.

The original version of the OCS was a 62-item questionnaire with five subscales; climate, involvement, communication, supervision, and meetings.  Initially employees were asked to describe what it was like to work in their organization and were urged to explain their perceptions through stories.  Questionnaires were administered to every organizational member and were filled out in scheduled locations at scheduled times.  By doing this, it eliminated the problems of poor return rate and sampling error, which provides a strength for this instrument.  This also helps to increase the instrument's reliability.  Items in each of the five subscales were subjected to a standard set of interim reliability and internal consistency analyses.  The revised questionnaire had 31 items because items were deleted if they were predictable by the other items of the subscale.  One main weakness of this tool is that it may not be as beneficial used by itself.  The article describes how it was able to make a more thorough evaluation by incorporating an interviewing process.

In order to assess test-retest reliability of the OCS, the full instrument was administered to 35 of the 52 subjects who agreed to participate in this phase of the research.  These specific subjects provided information about their birthday and the maiden name of their mother, which allowed the test and retest data to be matched while preserving the anonymity of research participants.

Application

Before researchers can approach the questions of whether organizational culture can be managed or whether strong cultures contribute to or reduce organizational performance, a methodology must be developed.  The methodology can be developed to enable the researcher to empirically establish what an organization's culture is at a particular point in time.

An example of what can emerge from the analyses of OCS scores is showing how an organization may have dissatisfied employees at all but the top management level.  It may also show that employees are experiencing low morale and are dissatisfied with their organization's level of teamwork, information flow, supervision and involvement.  These characteristics help researchers define an organization's culture and how to improve or change it to create a better atmosphere for all employees.

Involvement of some subjects in critical incident interviews will help elicit their interpretations of organizational events and help give a better understanding of the culture.

Glaser, S. R., Zamanou, S., & Hacker, K. (1987). Measuring and interpreting organizational culture. Management Communication Quarterly, 1(2), 173-198.