Diagnosing organizational cultures: A conceptual and empirical review of culture effectiveness surveys

Abstract

This review traces the development of survey research methods within the organizational culture tradition and focuses specifically on those instruments that measure the aspects of culture that are related to organizational effectiveness. Our review suggests that the reliability and validity of most instruments in this category is quite limited. This review outlines the recommended logic for the development and validation of culture effectiveness surveys and identifies three key challenges for future culture researchers to address: (1) the confirmatory testing of nested models, (2) the guidelines for aggregating data to the organizational level, and (3) the establishing of criterion-related validity. Using data from the Denison Organizational Culture Survey, we present an empirical illustration of the three challenges identified above and conclude by considering limitations and opportunities for future research.

Keywords:

• Cross-level analysis
• Organizational culture
• Organizational effectiveness
• Scale validation
• Survey

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Daniel Denison

The authors gratefully acknowledge the support for this work provided by IMD Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland and by Denison Consulting in Ann Arbor, MI, USA.