How to Evaluate Organizational Culture – and Change it!
Lots of change programs within organizations and teams simply suffer defeat. There is an expression that goes like this: Culture eats strategy for breakfast. And that’s right: you could agree on transforming your strategy, your customer service or whatever, but if this intended change doesn’t line up with the current organizational culture, you won’t get far…
Organizational culture identifies what a team appreciates, the way they comprehend things, their collective assumptions and convictions about work and so on and hence: their doings. When you look at results, organizational culture makes the difference because it has such a great effect on behavior. It is in the brains of executives and people on the floor where putting change into practise as well as developing performance begins. It has everything to do with shared culture. The trick is to let it work for you and not hamper change.
How would this be doable? You don’t know where you stand unless you have some reference. Using the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), you have a very clear beginning for just about any change process. This tool is validated and extended by professors Kim Cameron & Robert Quinn and is currently applied by more than 10,000 organizations across the globe.
The OCAI distinguishes four culture types with competing values built on the Competing Values Framework. Those are:
- Market Culture, based on Competing
- Hierarchy Culture, based on Controlling
- Clan Culture, based on Cooperating
- Adhocracy Culture, based on Creating
Even though this categorization may be elementary, it works tremendously well. Participants assess 6 essential features of their organization’s culture when completing the online survey. The result is a outline of the current culture, that’s a mix of the four archetypes above.
More often than not one of the culture types is dominant. For example, some people might have a dominant Clan Culture, sharing information and ideas, connecting and smiling.
After the change has occurred, people measure their preferred culture for the future. It is really interesting and useful to compare these 2 profiles. In case of a large difference between the current and preferred state, people might be all set for substantial change or are not feeling satisfied about their current working climate.
For instance, a number of colleagues have a nice working climate, but they know they should concentrate more on results. So they agree to improve parts of Market Culture and commence using parts of competition to get things done.
The primary step to successful, maintainable change is assessing organizational culture. It shows you where your team or organization is currently and where people want to go. It’s very enlightening to identify numerous subgroups and discover where for instance executives and employees differ. That gives guidelines on what to do next: how could you overcome resistance, what exactly do employees expect, how could executives make the change program better, etcetera.
Specifying your results in a workshop, takes you from the uncomplicated but well-defined four-typology to tailor made solutions for your organization. Working with all participants, you will be able to work out differences and really get people to not only say YES to the change program, but act like YES and really enforce the new behavior. And that’s where change essentially occurs!
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