The impact of organizational culture on employee work attitudes, readiness for change, and organizational performance

Culture in the context of a work organization is defined as the shared meanings, assumptions and values of people who work together. Despite the recent attention given to organizational culture in the popular business literature, the published studies have seldom addressed the issues that most concern managers and other decision makers. The psychological literature remains incomplete with respect to an understanding of the organizational culture construct. Intuitively, the culture of an organization may be expected to have an effect on factors such as employee attitudes and performance, yet few studies have directly examined the relationship of culture to measurable outcomes. Thus, the intent of the present research was to clarify the elements of organizational culture which are related to critical business objectives of an organization, such as improving employee morale, preparing for large-scale change, and increasing customer satisfaction. The goal was to identify important dimensions of organizational culture, using a multi-method approach which included the analysis of company documents (e.g., public relations brochures and employee publications), focus group and interview transcripts, and employee self-report data (via a sorting exercise and open-ended responses). The cultural profiles (based on the above types of data) of four utility companies in the Southeast were compared in order to determine how organizational culture influences (1) the perceptions and attitudes of employees on dimensions like trust in leadership and team work, (2) acceptance of the need for change and how well an organization is perceived to be prepared for that change, and (3) company performance (as measured by customer satisfaction). The results of the present study suggest that certain organizational culture dimensions are related to these outcomes, which have important implications for corporate policy and human resource practices. Examples include succession planning, corporate mergers, and large-scale change interventions. The current research also contributes to methodological issues surrounding the culture construct and the psychology of work literature.