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How Does Leadership Influence Organizational Culture?

• 02 Mar 2023

Organizational culture is a powerful driver of success. Yet it’s difficult to quantify and track, making it an intimidating but necessary challenge leaders must face.

How can you, as an organizational leader, shape a strong culture? Before exploring how, here’s a primer on organizational culture and why it matters.

What Is Organizational Culture, and Why Is It Important?

Organizational culture is the collection of values, beliefs, assumptions, and norms that guide activity and mindset in an organization.

Culture impacts every facet of a business, including:

• The way employees speak to each other
• The norms surrounding work-life balance
• The implied expectations when challenges arise
• How each employee feels about their work
• The permissibility of making mistakes
• How each team and department collaborate

Having a strong culture pays off financially: It can impact employees’ motivation, which, in turn, influences their work’s quality and efficiency, ability to reach goals, and retention rates. Having a culture that fosters innovation can also pay off in the form of new product ideas and creative solutions to problems .

It’s not possible to opt out of having an organizational culture—if you don’t put effort into crafting it, a negative one can emerge. If you’re an organizational leader —especially at a large company—you can’t directly speak to every employee, so you must influence culture from a high level.

Here are three ways you can influence organizational culture, the importance of effective communication, and how to build your skills.

Access your free e-book today.

How Do Leaders Influence Organizational Culture?

1. ensuring alignment on mission, purpose, and vision.

One way you can influence your organization’s culture is by ensuring everyone’s aligned on its mission, purpose, and vision.

Think of this communication as laying the foundation for culture. What customer need does your company fulfill? How does it make a positive impact? What’s its vision for the future, and what strategies are in place for getting there?

Additionally, ensure every employee understands how their daily work contributes to your organization’s success. According to a Salesforce report , more than 70 percent of U.S. employees say connecting to their company's culture and values motivates them to do their best work.

“Leading at scale and scope requires you to treat communication as a tool to reach out to people, captivate heads, and move hearts, so those you’re leading understand your actions and goals,” says Harvard Business School Professor Joshua Margolis in the online course Organizational Leadership . “And, perhaps more importantly, so they understand where they fit and why their work matters.”

2. Inspiring Confidence in the Face of Challenges

The way you react in times of tumult can powerfully impact culture. How do you pivot your company’s goals? Do you visibly panic, keep everything under wraps, or communicate with thoughtful transparency? Your reaction sets the tone for your team.

One example of a strong leader who crafted culture during crisis is explorer Ernest Shackleton. Shackleton’s original mission was to traverse Antarctica. But when his ship, the Endurance, was trapped and crushed by icebergs, it suddenly became irrelevant. The new mission was to get his team of 28 men home alive. One important part of doing so was managing the team’s culture.

“Critical to accomplishing his mission, he had to convince the crew that, individually and collectively, they can do it,” says HBS Professor Nancy Koehn in a sample business lesson on resilient leadership . “That they, under his leadership, are going to do that.”

Shackleton not only focused on increasing morale but on containing any doubts in the group. He asked the few men uncertain of success to sleep in his tent to influence their morale and keep them from spreading skepticism to the rest of the crew. His efforts paid off, and he led his team to safety.

Although not every challenge is a life-or-death situation like Shackleton’s, you can influence culture by letting your employees know their safety and well-being are a priority and that you’re confident in their ability to endure crises .

Related: How to Become a More Resilient Leader

3. Leveraging Mistakes as a Source of Learning

If you want to foster an innovative organizational culture, embracing and learning from mistakes is crucial.

“You can’t wave a wand, dictate to people that they need to be more creative, and wake up the next day to find people taking risks and trying new things,” says HBS Professor Anthony Mayo in Organizational Leadership .

If you chastise or punish employees for making mistakes, they’re far less likely to try new ideas. To unlock innovation’s potential, make it clear that experimentation is something to celebrate—regardless of its outcome. If an experiment fails, frame it as a chance to learn what worked and what didn’t.

If encouraging experimentation and failure feels too risky for your core business, designate a space or team specifically for testing innovative ideas.

The Importance of Communication in Shaping Organizational Culture

While each organization’s culture is unique, the common thread between strong ones is effective leadership communication .

When seeking alignment, inspiring confidence, and fostering innovation, how you choose to communicate determines whether your messages have their intended impacts.

In Organizational Leadership, Margolis and Mayo present five dimensions of communicating organizational direction , which you can use to shape culture, too:

• Know your audience: Have a firm understanding of your audience’s perspective. What information do they already know? What questions or concerns do they have? What factors matter most to them?
• Cater the content: Based on your audience, craft your message’s content to align with what they want and need to learn.
• Align on purpose: Determine your communication’s purpose. Is it to inform, meant to solicit input, gain approval, or motivate your audience?
• Design the process: Logistically, decide how you’ll deliver your message. Consider timing, frequency, channel, and who’s responsible.
• Compassion: Do you show your audience you care about their perspectives?
• Clarity: Do you communicate clearly to those unfamiliar with the message?
• Conciseness: Is the message short enough to internalize?
• Connection: Do you emotionally connect with your audience?
• Conviction: Do you demonstrate your commitment to the good of your organization?
• Courage: Do you demonstrate confidence in your ability to lead through uncertainty?

For example, consider how you might communicate mass layoffs to affected employees. How would your organizational culture be impacted if you sent a generic email to them rather than delivering the news face-to-face?

What about messaging the employees who aren’t being laid off? If you communicate the reasons for the decision and show empathy toward those impacted, you can build a culture of trust—which will be crucial to maintain with your remaining employees.

Every communication you deliver can shape organizational culture; it’s up to you to decide how to use it.

Building Your Leadership Skills

While shaping organizational culture can be challenging, all leaders face it. If you aim to build your leadership skills in this area, search for courses that include real-world examples.

In Organizational Leadership , you’re presented with real-world business cases —featuring leaders from companies including General Mills, McAfee, Medtronic, and Levi Strauss & Company—and prompted to consider how to handle each situation. Afterward, you discover how each leader approached challenges, gaining insights and perspectives you can apply to your organization.

By learning from others, communicating effectively, and making purposeful choices, you can leverage your leadership skills to shape organizational culture.

Are you interested in elevating your leadership skills? Explore Organizational Leadership —one of our online leadership and management courses —and learn how to communicate direction and lead at scale.

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Company Culture Is Everyone’s Responsibility

• Denise Lee Yohn

A top-down approach doesn’t work anymore.

A top down approach to building company culture no longer works for several reasons. For one, Covid-19 has upended how leaders interact with employees and how coworkers connect with each other. Next, company culture has grown in importance, thanks to recent high-profile crises at big name companies. A new culture-building approach is already in place at some organizations, one in which everyone in the organization is responsible for it. Importantly, this model doesn’t relegate culture-building to an amorphous concept that everyone influences but no one leads or is accountable for. And it weaves in perspectives from employees to customers, from middle managers to the CEO.

Here’s how organizational culture might have been handled in the past: The CEO commissions the Human Resources department to produce an effective company culture. HR designs a campaign to tout a mission statement and core values that the CEO and senior management developed. HR also implements some employee perks like free snacks in the break room or monthly birthday celebrations. Maybe they also field an annual employee engagement survey and report results back to the CEO. And then with their culture-building to-do lists completed, the CEO and HR move on to other priorities.

• Denise Lee Yohn is a leading authority on positioning great brands and building exceptional organizations, and has 25 years of experience working with world-class brands including Sony and Frito-Lay. Denise is a consultant, speaker, and author of What Great Brands Do: The Seven Brand-Building Principles that Separate the Best from the Rest and the new book FUSION: How Integrating Brand and Culture Powers the World’s Greatest Companies .   

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Workplace Dynamics

What is organizational culture and why is it important, here's how to transform your workplace culture to skyrocket performance..

Posted December 9, 2023 | Reviewed by Ray Parker

• Organizational culture is the collective mindsets and behaviors of a company.
• A positive workplace culture increases employee engagement, motivation, and retention.
• The seven strategies for creating a positive culture include celebrating achievements to boost morale.

Organizational culture is like the personality of an organization. It's about how everyone, from leaders to the newest hires, thinks and acts. It shapes how work gets done and how people treat each other.

Organizational culture includes the unwritten rules and shared beliefs that guide people's behavior. For instance, a company that values open communication might have meetings where everyone is encouraged to speak their mind, leading to better ideas and stronger performance.

Alternatively, if an organization has a culture where only the most senior employees' ideas are welcomed in meetings, it might lead to frustration and apathy for everyone else because others may feel their voice doesn't matter.

Culture: The Unique DNA of Every Organization

Culture is the underlying DNA of every organization—it's what makes employees feel connected and invested in their jobs. When a company has a strong, positive culture, it can foster greater engagement, which means people care more about their work and go the extra mile. Positive cultures boost motivation , leading people to do their best and be happier in their jobs. Such feelings of connection and satisfaction can lead them to stay longer with the company, reducing turnover and building a strong, experienced team.

When a culture encourages new ideas and open-mindedness, employees are more likely to come up with the kind of breakthroughs that can change the game for a business. In such an environment, teams work better together, share more ideas, and push each other to be the best they can be, which often leads to greater success for the whole organization.

Seven Strategies for Creating Positive Organizational Cultures

There are many ways to foster a positive business culture. Managers and leaders can focus on the following:

Vision and Mission Clarity : A compelling vision and mission statement act as the psychological contract with employees, offering a clear narrative about what the company stands for and its aspirations. When a company like Google pledges to "organize the world's information," it sends a powerful message about its purpose, aligning the workforce towards a common goal. Leaders can facilitate workshops and discussions to ensure these statements resonate deeply with every team member, thereby internalizing these guiding principles.

Values in Action: Core values are the psychological pillars of an organization's culture. When the online retailer Zappos emphasizes "delivering WOW through service," it's not just a statement but a call to action that employees live by so they deliver exceptional service. Leaders can make these values tangible by embedding them into performance reviews, hiring criteria, and daily operations, ensuring they're not just words on a wall but principles that drive decision-making and behavior. It's also important that leaders themselves act in a way that's consistent with the values they want to see enacted more broadly.

Habitual Practices: The power of culture is often expressed in the small, repeated actions that become habitual. For example, Pixar's practice of holding candid "braintrust" meetings where creative ideas are dissected and debated creates an environment where innovation is routine. Leaders can create rituals or regular meetings that reinforce openness and collaboration , turning them into powerful symbols that reinforce the organization's culture.

Learning and Development: Cultures that prioritize learning communicate to employees that growth is both expected and supported. Amazon's " Career Choice" program is a testament to its investment in employee development, covering tuition for in-demand fields. Leaders can foster a culture of learning by actively investing in employee development and creating clear pathways for career advancement.

Psychological Safety: At the heart of a thriving culture is the sense of psychological safety, a term coined by Harvard University professor Amy Edmondson, which describes an environment where individuals feel comfortable expressing themselves without fear of retribution. Google, for example, found that its teams with high psychological safety were more successful than those with lower psychological safety. Leaders can cultivate this by modeling vulnerability, encouraging open dialogue, and celebrating learning from failures.

Recognition and Rewards: A culture that celebrates achievements—both big and small—can significantly boost morale and productivity . Salesforce, through its "Ohana Culture," has created a sense of community and belonging where recognition is part of the everyday experience. Leaders can implement recognition programs that allow peers to acknowledge each other's contributions, making recognition a regular part of the organizational rhythm.

Agility and Resilience : The most adaptable cultures are those that embrace change. Leaders can promote agility by encouraging a mindset of continuous learning and by designing systems that are flexible and responsive to feedback, ensuring the organization can navigate and thrive amidst disruptive change.

Creating a High-Performance Culture

Creating a culture that promotes high performance requires a deep psychological understanding of human behavior within a business context. By carefully crafting and nurturing the elements that constitute culture, leaders can foster an environment that not only drives innovation and high performance but also leads to a sense of purpose and belonging among its members. Building a cohesive community focused on achieving purposeful goals is a critical imperative for making organizations and the world a better place.

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-it…

Edmondson, Amy and Lei, Zhike (2014). Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an Interpersonal Construct, Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, Vol. 1:23-43.

Kaplan, S. (2017). The invisible advantage: How to create a culture of innovation . Greenleaf Book Group Press.

Soren Kaplan, Ph.D. , is an author, keynote speaker, leadership development consultant, and affiliate at the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California.

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Organisational culture: what is it and how does it affect organisational effectiveness?

An organisation’s culture can play a significant role in determining the organisation’s success – or its failure. This is because organisational culture determines everything from how decisions are made to how employees feel and behave within the organisation.

Built on a foundation of organisational values, and reflecting the behaviours of its leaders, an organisation’s culture is effectively the personality of the organisation or business. How does it treat people? What sorts of practices, processes, and policies does it prioritise? These are important questions, because the culture an organisation develops can help to deliver on performance and organisational goals, strategic objectives, and can even influence employee recruitment and retention. In short: a strong culture is a powerful asset within any business – and a dysfunctional organisational culture can significantly stunt its success. 

So what exactly is organisational culture? A commonly used definition comes from Daniel R. Denison, a professor of organisation and management who co-wrote a paper called Toward a Theory of Organisational Culture and Effectiveness with Aneil K. Mishra. Denison says that organisational culture is “the underlying values, beliefs, and principles that serve as the foundation for an organisation’s management system, as well as the set of management practices and behaviours that both exemplify and reinforce those basic principles.” 

According to the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) , the UK association for human resource management professionals, organisational culture “matters because it offers a way for employees to understand their organisation, to voice their views, and to develop connections and common purpose.”

What are the different types of organisational cultures?

Organisational cultures can be broken down into several different categories. For example, the Competing Values Framework outlines four classifications for organisational culture and leadership.

• Adhocracy culture . Also known as the create culture, adhocracy culture is commonly seen in entrepreneurial businesses. A blend of ad hoc and bureaucracy, adhocracy is focused on flexibility and innovation.
• Clan culture . Also known as the collaborative culture, this organisational culture is focused on people first.
• Hierarchy culture . Hierarchy culture is also known as control culture, and is process-oriented, with clear structures and procedures in place for everyone from entry level employees to high-level stakeholders.
• Market culture . Market culture is driven by results, and is also known as compete culture. It’s driven by profitability, a competitive advantage, and the organisation’s bottom line.

The Harvard Business Review , meanwhile, identifies eight different types of corporate cultures.

• Caring cultures , which are focused on collaborative relationships, teamwork, a good work-life balance, and mutual trust. 
• Purpose cultures , which are focused on idealism and altruism. 
• Learning cultures , which are characterised by creativity and innovation among team members.
• Enjoyment cultures , which feature lighthearted working environments.
• Results cultures , which are driven by achievements, and are focused on outcomes and business performance.
• Authority cultures , which are defined by strength and decisiveness in decision-making as well as competitive work environments.
• Safety cultures , which are risk-conscious and focused on planning and preparedness.
• Order cultures , which are focused on respect, structure, and shared norms. 

What are the main factors that influence organisational culture?

There are several schools of thought when it comes to organisation culture, what shapes it, and what influences it.

For example, Edgar Schein , Professor Emeritus at the MIT Sloan School of Management, argued that organisational culture had three levels:

• artefacts , which are the organisational attributes that can be seen and heard by anyone. For example, the appearance of offices and décor, how employees dress, and how they interact with others.
• values , which are cultural elements that are explicitly stated: mission statements, slogans, corporate values and behaviours, and so on. 
• basic assumptions , which are the common beliefs that evolve within the organisation and form a pattern while never being explicitly articulated or challenged.

Others, such as Professor Geert Hofstede – a social psychologist – developed an organisational culture model with six factors:

• Organisational effectiveness . Is the organisation means-oriented or goal-oriented? Is it primarily focused on what it achieves, or how it achieves it?
• Customer orientation . Is the organisation internally driven or externally driven?  
• Level of control . Is the organisation easygoing or strict in terms of work discipline?
• Focus . Are employees within the organisation locally focused on their immediate boss or team, or professionally focused?
• Approachability . Does the organisation operate as an open system or a closed system? 
• Management philosophy . Is the organisation employee-oriented or work-oriented? 

Understanding the impact of organisational culture

How does the culture of an organisation impact organisational change.

An organisation’s culture can directly influence its response to organisational change. This is significant, with the CIPD pointing out that an “effective approach to managing change is vital because evidence indicates that few change initiatives are successful. This failure can have a great impact on an organisation, both in their market position and the engagement and retention of employees.”

With people and culture being the single biggest drivers of organisational change success, it’s obvious that a dynamic, change-receptive culture is key to ensuring the success of any organisational change programmes.

How does the culture of an organisation impact individual and organisational performance?

It’s clear that organisational culture has a large part to play in driving the effectiveness of the organisation – and the individual – however, research to establish firmer links between culture and organisational performance, or employee performance outcomes, is still ongoing.

“There’s speculation that culture affects organisational performance, and some organisations have put great effort into changing their culture and structure to improve this,” reports the CIPD. “However, while managing organisational culture is increasingly seen as a necessary part of governance and management practice, research evidence on the link between organisational culture and performance is weak.”

That said, in his recently published book Win from Within: Build Organisational Culture for Competitive Advantage , James Heskett highlights the correlations between organisational culture and employee loyalty, productivity, and creativity.

And according to Tom Peters, who co-wrote the 1980s strategic management book In Search of Excellence , says that culture drives in behaviour , and that in turn, organisational behaviour “has direct impact on the bottom line, costs, revenue streams, level of productivity, customer satisfaction, even the brand – every aspect of the business is affected.”

Additionally, Jennifer A. Chatman and other academics have written extensively on the topic of leadership, its impact on organisational culture – and the impact on performance. For example, in a publication titled The Promise and Problems of Organisational Culture: CEO Personality, Culture, and Firm Performance , Chatman and others found that “CEO personality affects a firm’s culture and that culture is subsequently related to a broad set of organisational outcomes including a firm’s financial performance, reputation, analysts’ stock recommendations, and employee attitudes.”

How does the culture of an organisation impact the organisation’s ability to innovate?

There are a number of organisational culture styles that encourage – or inhibit – innovation. For example, both the adhocracy and learning cultures place a strong emphasis on innovative behaviours and outcomes, while a hierarchy culture or order company culture are more likely to favour tried-and-true processes and procedures that restrict innovation and new ideas.

How does the culture of an organisation impact the organisation’s ability to compete?

Much like innovation, organisational competitiveness can be directly influenced by the organisation’s culture and its core values. Market culture, for example, is often referred to as compete culture, and is focused primarily on market competitiveness.

Models for improving corporate culture and organisational effectiveness

Regardless of whether a leader is focused on corporate culture and performance, or the culture and performance within a health care setting – or anything in between – there are a number of different models, methods, and leadership styles that can be used to create a set of shared values and a strong organisational culture.

One example is Dr. John Kotter’s eight-step process for leading change . Another is the McKinsey 7-S framework .

Help shape the culture of your organisation

You could advance your career in management and leadership with the 100% online MBA Leadership from Lincoln International Business School at the University of Lincoln. This degree has been created for ambitious professionals who want to fast-track their career progression, and because it’s studied part-time and fully online, you can learn around your current work and personal commitments.

Through one of your core modules, you’ll have the opportunity to learn about leading and developing individuals and high-performance teams within an organisational culture. This degree also explores other areas of leadership, such as talent management, learning organisations, workforce design, succession planning, and diversity and inclusion. Another key module on this programme is in leading organisational change, so you could examine organisational change theories, models, and frameworks, as well as different approaches for managing change, and new ways of working across infrastructure, processes, people, and culture to promote the effective leading of organisational change.

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What is Organizational Culture? Understanding and Driving a Strong Culture

Kristin Ryba

July 14, 2022 | 6 minute read

So what is organizational culture? And how can you harness company culture to engage employees, improve performance, and make your company a great place to work?

In this article, we’ll answer what organizational culture is, why it matters, and how you can build a strong and engaging culture.

What is organizational culture?

Organizational culture is the way that organizations get things done. It’s how we make decisions, how we communicate, and how we celebrate employees. It’s the daily actions, attitudes, and behaviors that individually and collectively make up our organization.

Why is organizational culture important?

Your company culture impacts everything within your organization. It can help or hinder you, depending on how intentional you are with it. An engaging organizational culture helps you:

• Attract high quality talent
• Boost employee engagement
• Increase employee retention
• Strengthen employee performance
• Adapt to change
• Accelerate business outcomes

Your workplace culture is a key driver of the employee experience. It can have a positive, negative, or neutral effect on key business metrics like retention, recruitment, and engagement.

65% of millennials rank a strong workplace culture as more important than salary.

Workplace culture matters to prospective employees . For millennials, it matters more than money! A positive and engaging culture can help you attract top talent.

Employees who say their culture is positive are 3.8x more likely to be engaged.

Company culture and employee engagement are inextricably linked. If you want to improve employee engagement, take a look at your culture.

An engaging culture connects, equips, and empowers employees to do their best work.

Employees who say their culture has improved since the pandemic are 2.9x more likely to be highly engaged.

Workplaces have been through a lot of change since the pandemic—and so have their employees and cultures. Employees have taken notice of improvements in those organizations that have been intentional about shaping their culture in this new world of work.

Disengaged employees are 2.6x more likely to leave their company for a better culture.

Company culture and engagement are sticky factors that make employees want to stay. A Glassdoor survey says 7 in 10 employees would look for a job elsewhere if their workplace culture were to weaken. Culture is a critical retention strategy.

70% of high-performing organizations agree or strongly agree that culture is what drives their success on organizational and business outcomes.

There’s a reason company culture has become a top priority for leaders— especially leaders at high-performing organizations . They understand the connection between culture and success.

How organizational culture has changed

Workplace culture has historically been defined as organizational norms, rituals, and values. But how employees perceive company culture has changed.

35% of employees say their culture has changed dramatically since the start of the pandemic.

As the workplace has shifted since the pandemic, culture has shifted too. Some employees say it's changed for the better—others say for the worse. Whether or not you’re actively investing in your culture, someone or something is shaping it. 

It’s important for leaders to keep a pulse on company culture to ensure they’re driving the right changes at the right times.

1 in 3 employees has neutral or negative perceptions of their organization’s culture.

Many organizations have successfully navigated turbulent pandemic times and have adapted to remote and hybrid work. However, about a third of employees have poor perceptions of their workplace culture. This is a tough number to swallow considering the connection between culture, employee engagement, and employee retention.

50% of employees experience culture most strongly through their organization’s approach to employee performance.

In today’s employee-driven work environment, the way you manage performance has a strong impact on engagement and culture. Building a high performance culture is key. 

Our workplace culture research shows that how managers create alignment, communicate, recognize, and give feedback all shape how employees experience your culture.

Only 28% of employees experience culture most strongly through the physical workspace.

Many leaders have expressed thoughts about the importance of the physical workspace on culture. But our research shows it’s least important to how employees experience culture.

Remote and hybrid employees are more favorable toward workplace culture.

Remote and hybrid work environments are becoming the norm—and this shift has impacted employee perceptions of culture . 70% of remote and hybrid workers believe their company has a strong and positive culture, compared to 65% and 58% of on-site employees, respectively.

Tips for shaping culture in a remote/hybrid work environment

Culture cannot and will not look the same as it once did. Forward-thinking, adaptable leaders need to shape their culture strategies with remote and hybrid employees in mind. These 10 strategies, backed by our research, will help you build an engaging culture for all employees .

• Listen to your employees through surveys
• Evolve your approach to employee performance
• Make culture part of your business strategy
• Promote activities that build connection
• Recognize and celebrate your employees
• Find opportunities to deepen understanding of your mission and values
• Rethink how you onboard employees
• Develop your managers to thrive with remote and hybrid teams
• Consider new ways of communicating and collaborating
• Prioritize flexibility and autonomy

Learn more about shaping company culture in a remote work environment >>>

Why leaders are responsible for organizational culture

WeWork describes culture as an employee-powered concept . It truly takes every person inside your organization to build an engaging and successful culture.

But employees say leaders and managers are primarily responsible for creating and shaping culture. Culture starts at the top. Leaders should clearly define culture, communicate about it regularly, set a good example, and tie business outcomes to company values. This will empower all employees to develop, practice, and evolve cultural norms.

Tips for developing a strong organizational culture

Rome wasn’t built in a day, and neither is your culture. A positive, culture-centric organization takes time to develop. 

To cultivate the kind of culture that inspires action, engages employees, and drives performance, you need to approach it thoughtfully and intentionally.

An article by the Harvard Business Review describes culture as dynamic —shifting incrementally and constantly in response to change. This requires a flywheel approach to collecting feedback, analyzing it, and acting on your culture. 

Ask: Gather employee feedback on culture.

You can’t rely on your gut to understand your culture. You need to ask employees about their experiences at work—they’ll tell you what they think and what they need from you. Collecting their feedback will help you understand what’s working and what’s not. 

To develop an employee listening strategy that helps you measure and improve your culture , you should gather feedback at many milestones in the employee journey. 

Don’t simply rely on your annual employee engagement survey. Supplement your listening with regular pulse surveys and employee lifecycle surveys to capture feedback at key moments like onboarding and exits.

Not sure what to ask? Here are some recommendations for employee survey questions about culture : 

• The work I do contributes to fulfilling our organization’s mission.
• I see behaviors displayed across our organization that are consistent with our company’s core values.
• I have a good understanding of our organization’s mission, values, and goals.
• Our organization constantly looks for ways to improve products and services.
• The pace of work at our organization enables employees to do a good job.

Our culture supports employees’ health and wellbeing.

Aha: Analyze your culture regularly.

Once you’ve got some data from your employee feedback, dig into it. Don’t analyze the feedback in a silo—connect it to other data and metrics like turnover and performance conversations. The goal is to paint a picture of what’s happening across the organization.

Figure out what an engaging culture should look like and plan goals and initiatives to get there.

Act: Develop a culture action plan.

Show employees you are committed to improving your culture by making meaningful changes that better the employee experience and help everyone reach their goals. When your employees are successful, you will be successful too. 

A healthy culture drives employee engagement first and foremost. When you evaluate “how work gets done” at your organization, try to understand how each aspect could impact employee engagement. You want to ensure employees feel connected to their work, team, and organization through your culture strategies.

Find the right tools to help you improve your culture.

A robust employee engagement, performance, and people analytics platform will outline the big picture behind your culture and help you understand where to focus and when. 

With the right tools, you can uncover deep insights, measure employee perceptions, and create a thriving culture. Here are the top benefits of a robust culture platform: 

• Understand employee perceptions of culture
• Explore culture metrics and trends 
• Recognize employee success
• Create conversations around culture 
• Align employees and teams by elevating what matters

How Quantum Workplace can help

Focus on what matters when it comes to culture. Download a copy of our  2022 Organizational Culture Research Report   today.

Published July 14, 2022 | Written By Kristin Ryba

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Conceptualizing organizational culture and business-IT alignment: a systematic literature review

• Original Article
• Open access
• Published: 08 August 2022
• Volume 2 , article number  120 , ( 2022 )

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• Marcel R. Sieber   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2282-6164 1 ,
• Milan Malý   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-5812-918X 2 &
• Radek Liška   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4639-7026 2  

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For decades, business and information technology alignment has fascinated scholars and practitioners. However, understanding these alignment mechanisms is challenging. The significant role of information technology (IT) in digitalization and agile transformation calls for targeted management of the readiness and capability of IT as an enabler and strategic business partner. This paper assumes that organizational culture is a success factor for business-IT alignment. Therefore, it aims to explore the culture-alignment relationship by the following research questions: What are typical IT management organizational culture characteristics, and how do they contribute to business-IT alignment? The study conducts a systematic literature review. First, after defining the critical terms, it searches the databases indexed in the Web of Science, Scopus, and Google Scholar. Then, the study uses bibliometrics to get quantitative insights into the research topic. Finally, it investigates the key arguments and findings of the selected papers. The analyzed literature depicts the relationship between an IT management culture and business-IT alignment elements. However, the research lacks concrete modeling and conception. This article contributes to a better culture-alignment relationship interpretation and closes a gap in the body of knowledge by combining quantitative and qualitative literature review methods.

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Introduction

The growing economic importance of information technology (IT) leads to an increased significance of the alignment of business and IT (Chan and Reich 2007 , p. 298; Hiekkanen et al. 2015 ; Jonathan 2018 ; Kappelman et al. 2013 ; Luftman and Brier 1999 ). Especially when industries and businesses encounter agile and digital transformation challenges, IT departments and their alignment to the business play a crucial role (Gajardo and Ariel 2019 ). Furthermore, IT supports the business in realizing digitalization opportunities as a provider of dedicated digital infrastructure, products, services, and solutions (Kahre et al. 2017 ).

Although regularly on top of the practitioners’ and scientists’ agendas, business-IT alignment remains challenging (Jonathan and Hailemariam 2020 ; Luftman et al. 2013 , p. 357). Business and IT need a mutual understanding , strategically aligned as one, founded on IT governance (Chew and Gottschalk 2013 , pp. 186–190). As part of corporate governance, IT governance ensures that IT supports and enlarges the organizations’ strategies and objectives, including the alignment of IT to realize business gains (IT Governance Institute 2003 , pp. 10–11). It also helps prioritize and allocate the needed resources (Luftman and Brier 1999 , p. 119). However, traditionally, IT primarily remains in a strategically executive role, functional and essentially subordinate to the business (Hiekkanen et al. 2012 , Kahre et al. 2017 , p. 4706). This perspective roots in the senior executives’ perceptions of IT as a cost factor in a historical context because it has not achieved the expected competitive advantage in the 1980s and 1990s (Chew and Gottschalk 2013 , p. 327; Peppard and Ward 1999 , p. 32). Practitioners regularly report shortcomings of IT realizations in time, cost, and quality; this is mainly an issue of the critical relationship between cost-efficiency and effectiveness, including the role of IT strategy and culture (Aitken 2003 ). Critics about a hindering IT culture because of its stability and security tendencies call for entrepreneurial, or at least commercial behaviors in IT functions, welcoming change and risks (Aitken 2003 ).

Many organizations still struggle with the cultural separation of IT and business , which results in a “us” vs. “them” and a lack of synchronized governance of decisions and strategies (Chew and Gottschalk 2013 , p. 186; Mithas and McFarlan 2017 , p. 6). As a result, the relationship between business and IT remains potentially conflictual (Leidner and Kayworth 2006 ). Besides the biased attitude towards IT, such conflicts concern the user groups of information systems and their often contradictory vision (Leidner and Kayworth 2006 , pp. 374–375). Although they found only a few studies about the managerial’s role, Leidner and Kayworth ( 2006 , p. 380) proposed that managers could reduce conflicts by shaping and promoting shared values in business and IT. Such values would be part of a shared organizational culture, fostering the relationship between business and IT. However, the business-IT partnership also depends on the IT department’s business orientation, managerial knowledge, and perceived IT value. Accordingly, although to a relatively small magnitude, a significantly technology-oriented IT negatively impacts the relationship between business and IT (Manfreda and Indihar Štemberger 2019 , p. 962). These findings are consistent with the research of 20 years ago, where the examined organizations’ IT management acknowledged that they need to increase their business knowledge (Peppard and Ward 1999 , p. 50).

Before this background, this paper aims to explore the influence of organizational culture on business-IT alignment, i.e., if particular organizational culture dimensions help IT management leaders or teams suitably align to the business. It investigates the following research questions:

What are the information technology management’s typical organizational culture characteristics?

How do these characteristics contribute to the alignment of business and information technology?

Therefore, it employs a systematic literature review and follows a hybrid approach by integrating a bibliometric and structured review (Paul and Criado 2020 , p. 2). As a result, the study presents a comprehensive and extended overview of the knowledge base about the relationship between organizational culture and business-IT alignment. Furthermore, it discusses the implications of research strategies, bibliometric analyses, and qualitative aspects of the literature review in this paper.

The remainder of the paper starts with the theoretical background and then explains the methodology, including the search procedure and strategy, bibliometrics, and paper selection. Then follow the results with quantitative and qualitative analyses of the references, which reflect the relevance and relation of the critical research topics and the studies relating to this paper’s research questions. After the discussion of the results with summarizing them before the theoretical background, the paper finally closes in the conclusions by considering this paper’s contributions and limitations and answering the research questions.

Theoretical background

The concept of alignment is only vaguely defined (Hiekkanen et al. 2012 , p. 219). This study takes a decent strategic management point of view. From this perspective, the common goal to deliver the best value and service to the information system’s user denotes the relationship between business and IT strategy (Buchta et al. 2010 ). Different models and frameworks for business-IT alignment exist in the literature (El-Mekawy 2016 ). The strategic alignment model (SAM) of Henderson and Venkatraman ( 1993 ) and the strategic alignment maturity model (SAMM), published by Luftman ( 2000 ), are probably the most cited and widely used works. This paper relies on Henderson and Venkatraman’s ( 1993 , p. 472) model and its definition of business-IT alignment as “four fundamental domains of strategic choice: business strategy, information technology strategy, organizational infrastructure and processes, and information technology infrastructure and processes,” see Fig.  1 . Along with these traits, business and IT align in a mutual “process of continuous adaptation and change” (Henderson and Venkatraman 1993 , p. 473).

Strategic alignment model (adapted from Henderson and Venkatraman 1993 )

The SAMM focuses on maturity levels, measured by six criteria (Luftman 2000 , p. 10): Communications, competency/value, governance, partnership, scope & architecture, and skills. The last criterium contains an organization’s cultural and social environment (Luftman 2000 , p. 20). This overlapping with organizational culture is the most important reason not to include the SAMM in this paper’s analyses.

Organizational culture is multi-faceted, and no widely shared definition exists. Table 1 provides a brief classification of organizational culture perspectives. The first authors emphasize culture as a variable or out of a functional view (Baetge et al. 2007 , p. 186). They argue that an organization has a specific culture that can be managed, measured, and compared. The second group of scholars states that an organization is a culture, with its uniqueness and perceptions of practices (Hofstede et al.), values (Sagiv et al.), and underlying assumptions (Schein). These perspectives are more subjective than the above noted; they are harder to compare. The third theory evolved as a combination of those mentioned above and questions the deterministic, taken-for-granted, and simply assessable view of organizational culture (Alvesson 2013 , pp. 31–32). Alvessonn ( 2013 , p. 65) advises studying the specific cultural manifestations and their consequences rather than the entire corporate culture and its impact on organizational performance.

This paper takes a functional perspective and focuses on culture as “the norms and values that guide behavior within organizations” (Chatman and O’Reilly 2016 , p. 218). Culture is responsible for adapting organizations to their societal and economic environment, and it integrates structures and processes for the alignment of conjoint activities (Herget and Strobl 2018 , p. 6). That functional view also holds Cameron and Quinn’s ( 2011 , p. 168) Competing Values Framework (CVF). It emphasizes culture as a variable that can be managed and measured at the corporate level. This paper defines organizational culture before the background of the CVF as “a potential predictor of other organizational outcomes (such as effectiveness),” which “includes core values and consensual interpretations about how things are” (Cameron and Quinn 2011 , p. 169).

Figure  2 depicts the framework with its four quadrants and characteristics. It spans two dimensions: the y-axis contrasts effectiveness between flexibility/freedom to act and stability vs. control , the x-axis internal focus and integration , and external focus and differentiation . The dimensions’ properties result in the four ideal-typical quadrants Clan , Adhocracy , Market , and Hierarchy .

Competing values framework (adapted from Cameron and Quinn ( 2011 , p.53))

Prior research shows an influence of business-IT alignment on various outcomes, such as competitive advantage (Kearns and Lederer 2003 ), business/organizational performance (Chan and Reich 2007 , p. 298; Charoensuk et al. 2014 ; Hiekkanen et al. 2012 ; Kahre et al. 2017 , p. 4707), process performance (Cleven 2011 ); organizational agility (Koçu 2018 ; Lemrabet et al. 2011 ), organizational change (Wattel 2012 ), and information security (El Mekawy et al. 2014 ).

However, there is a shortcoming of studies about the relationship between organizational culture and business-IT alignment (El-Mekawy et al. 2016 ); culture is just one among other factors of business-IT alignment (Hiekkanen et al. 2012 , p. 221). We know a lot about organizational culture and effectiveness (Denison and Mishra 1995 ; Hartnell et al. 2011 ; Quinn and Rohrbaugh 1983 ; Wallach 1983 ), performance (Dasgupta 2014 ; Deshpandé and Farley 2004 ; Henri 2006 ; Heskett 2012 ; Kotter and Heskett 1992 ; Wilkins and Ouchi 1983 ), and (organizational) agility (Felipe et al. 2017 ; Iivari and Iivari 2011 ; Ravichandran 2018 ; Sambamurthy et al. 2003 ; Tallon et al. 2019 ) but not in direct relation to business-IT alignment.

Methodology

This study conducted a systematic literature review. As a guideline and intention to structure the review procedure, the paper applied the  Preferred reporting items for systematic reviews and meta-analyses (PRISMA) statement (Moher et al. 2009 ; Jackson et al. 2015 , p. 41). That framework helps scholars improve the review’s reporting and consists of a checklist with different items, which reflect the iterative process of reviews, and a proposed flow diagram for screening and selecting the literature (Moher et al. 2009 , pp. 5–6; 8).

The paper followed a hybrid approach, as described in (Paul and Criado 2020 , p. 2). After a domain-based systematic literature search, it conducted a bibliometric analysis with the found references and selected the full-text articles and conference papers. Finally, the analysis structured and discussed the selected studies’ contributions to the body of knowledge.

Search procedure

Table 2 summarizes the approach for getting the relevant search terms. The main aspects in column one reflect the keywords regarding the research questions. For example, the terms IT , short for information technology , and different business and IT alignment writings, such as business-IT or IT-business alignment – with or without the hyphen–, company alignment , or just alignment , are challenging.

Columns two and three of Table 2 present the binding and related terms, i.e., synonyms, derived from the key terms. Bold terms or parts of the terms indicate possible truncations for the search procedure to find words with different typings, such as organization, organizational, the British organisation, organisational, and the German Organisation, or Organisations-. Emphasized words with an asterisk are terms out of the scope of this literature review. This study followed a strategic and socio-institutional organizational culture and business-IT alignment approach. This institutional perspective excluded psychological concepts such as identity and climate or operational and process concepts such as operations and maturity . Also out of scope were emerging investigations relating to data and data science as special information systems topics.

The research strategy considered databases of the Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science (WoS), Elsevier’s Scopus, and Google Scholar, as, for example, Yang and Meho ( 2007 , p. 12) and Paul and Criado ( 2020 , p. 3) recommend. The search procedure from May 2022 needed appropriate adaptation since these providers use different forms, syntaxes, and filters.

For the Web of Science , this study applied the following steps:

Select the suitable indexes,

Use the search field Topic, which searches the documents’ title , abstracts , author keywords , and Keywords Plus , i.e., the keywords attributed automatically by the indexing database,

Apply truncations, for example, organi?ati* , corpor* , or enterpr* , and connect the terms by the boolean operator OR,

Use the particular operator NEAR/50 with culture, truncated as *ultur* , which enables the finding of, for example, organizational and culture within a distance of 50 words,

Add rows with the boolean AND and the terms of the other main aspects of Table 2 ,

Add rows with the boolean NOT with all terms out of the scope of the research field,

Search and refine the results by the document types articles, conference papers, books, book chapters (if apparent), and Web of Science categories.

For Scopus , the steps were similar:

Search within article title , abstract , and keywords ,

Connect the truncated terms with OR and culture with W/50, similar to the Web of Science operator NEAR/50,

Add main aspect terms with AND,

Exclude terms out of focus with AND NOT ,

Exclude subject areas irrelevant to the research field, such as Arts and Humanities , Environmental Science , Mathematics , or Medicine ,

Limit to document type, i.e., article, conference paper, book chapter, and book,

Exclude most apparent keywords not relevant to the search terms, such as Knowledge Management , Societies and Institutions , Project Management , Marketing , Personnel , or Human Resource Management .

Since Google Scholar is less standardized than Web of Science and Scopus, the search procedure differs. A similar search strategy in Google Scholar would have given too many results. Therefore, we used the exact terms, such as organizational culture or corporate culture and business-IT alignment . The results must be sorted by relevance, and the box named “include citations” unticked. Finally, it tooks a manual effort by ticking the star to include the references with the terms in the title and description in the personal library.

This review protocol aligns with Moher et al. ( 2009 ) checklist items five and eight. Appendix A of the supplementary material summarizes and refers to the checklist’s items in this study, Appendix B depicts the review protocol with further details of the search procedure.

Bibliometric analysis

Bibliometrics helps the researcher quantitatively overview the publications’ citation trends and the state-of-the-art of a research field or topic (Paul and Criado 2020 , p. 2; Aria et al. 2020 , p. 805). By using statistical tools, bibliometric analysis knows mainly two branches. First, the bibliometric performance analysis measures scholars’ publication activity and productivity over time and how often they get cited (Aria et al. 2020 , p. 805). Second, the science mapping analyzes and visualizes a specific domain’s structural and knowledge linkages (Aria et al. 2020 , p. 806). In order to answer the research questions, we focused on the afore-mentioned second purpose of bibliometrics.

For this purpose, we applied the regularly updated R-package bibliometrix , explained and maintained by Aria and Cuccurullo ( 2017 ), who propose a science mapping workflow. For bibliometric analysis, other software tools are available, such as CitNetExplorer (van and Waltman 2014 ), HistCite (HistCite - Research HUB n.d.), Pajek (Mrvar and Batagelj 2016 ), or SciMAT (Cobo et al. 2012 ). However, the evaluation of different tools is out of the scope of this paper. Since we are used to R as a convenient statistical tool, and bibliometrix is fully integrated and reasonable for our purpose, we consequently applied it in this study.

The first step of the science mapping workflow was loading the data and converting it into an R data frame (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017 , p. 963). Therefore, the bibliometrix package provides a particular function for Web of Science and Scopus data. Next, the Scopus data frame needed additional fields and a change of sorting for the later merge with the Web of Science data. For Google Scholar, we applied the R-function ReadBib of the RefManageR package (McLean 2014 ). Again, with additional fields, a renaming of columns, and new sorting, we adapted the Google Scholar data to the Web of Science format. Finally, we eliminated duplicate entries by title after combining the three files. The remaining records were the final sample for the bibliometric analysis.

This approach corresponds to the checklist item seven of Moher et al. ( 2009 ).

Paper selection

According to Moher et al. ( 2009 , p. 2), the paper selection’s first step identified the records through database searching. After removing duplicates and filtering by publication date, this study applied the following eligibility criteria:

The sources are open access or available through the lookup engines of this paper’s authors’ affiliation libraries.

In the full-text papers, the key terms notably appear. However, it is insufficient to mention them in the references without citation, and it needs arguing about considering them for further examination.

The key terms are properties in the studies’ research model, methodology, propositions, hypotheses, or findings.

These steps correspond to items six and nine of Moher et al.’s ( 2009 ) checklist.

Quantitative analyses

Although the Web of Science quality assurance is the highest reported (Aria et al. 2020 , p. 807), the addition of Scopus and Google Scholar resulted in a more general picture of the body of knowledge (Yang and Meho 2007 , p. 12). The study counted 345 records on the Web of Science, 307 references on Scopus, and 42 entries on Google Scholar. After eliminating duplicates, there remained 660 records. The bibliometrix algorithm filters the records by publication year spanning 1984 to 2022, document type, and average citation per year. As Fig. 6 depicts, the filtering by the period from 1984 to 2022 led to a reduced sample of 631 records.

Table 3 depicts the primary information regarding this collection.

This compilation and the following analyses stem from applying the R tool bibliometrix (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017 ). The collection contains 631 documents published in 501 sources. Furthermore, it shows the number of document contents (keywords), authors, authors’ collaboration indexes, and document types.

With an annual growth rate of 7.57%, the annual scientific production of Fig.  3 , i.e., the number of articles published per year, shows a growing trend over the last 20 years.

Annual scientific production

The ten most relevant sources in Table 4 are of considerable validity for the research topic. They consist of high-quality journals, such as Organization Science , Industrial Marketing Management , or Long Range Planning .

Next, we used the words’ analysis section in the documents part of bibliometrix . The options for counting the most frequent words are the fields keywords , titles , or abstracts . We chose abstracts with bigrams , i.e., two-word terms, and the 50 most apparent words. Another important option is to load a list of terms to remove . This list contains regularly used methodological terms, such as empirical research , structural equation , equation modeling , or more general ones, like success factors or future research .

Figure  4 depicts the most frequent bigrams in the paper abstracts with a treemap.

Treemap of the most frequent bigrams in the abstracts

It shows that organizational culture counts 108 and is the third most mentioned after knowledge management with 145 and information technology with 138. However, if we include corporate and organisational , the term  organizational culture is with 166 the most mentioned. The terms regarding business-IT alignment are indirect, strategical topics, such as competitive advantage , business strategy , strategic alignment , and strategic management . Added up, they occur 148 times.

The study can then draw a conceptional framework picture of the research field with a so-called co-occurrence network or co-word analysis (Aria and Cuccurullo 2017 , p. 969). This analysis mapped and clustered the data collection terms from the abstracts. Figure  5 depicts that the node of organizational culture has a strong emphasis beside information technology where strategic alignment occurs, although to a lower extent.

Co-occurrence network of the bigrams in the abstracts

Qualitative analysis

As the study reports and depicts in Fig.  6 , the first step of the literature selection was removing duplicates and filtering the search results by the timespan 1984–2022.

Literature selection scheme, adapted from Moher et al. ( 2009 , p. 8)

This step resulted in 631 studies and excluded 63 records. Second, after screening the results with culture / cultural and align / alignment in the abstract, 92 records remained, eliminating 539 entries. Third, from these 92 records, 37 papers were assessed for eligibility by filtering the full texts. The records were deleted if the key terms were not substantially mentioned in the papers and did not appear in the research model, methodology, propositions, hypotheses, or findings. Finally, the fourth step assembled 15 articles and conference papers from these 37 records for further analyses. The selected literature had to contribute to the research questions of this paper.

The relationship between organizational culture and business-IT alignment lacks broad examination (Silvius et al. 2009 ; El-Mekawy et al. 2016 ). There were few literature review studies in the business-IT alignment research field in the reference sample. Moreover, they scarcely investigate organizational or corporate culture properties.

Based on Chan and Reich’s ( 2007 , pp. 300–301) alignment dimensions, Spósito et al. ( 2016 , p. 554) found that less than two-thirds of the papers consider culture. Nevertheless, they do not discuss the papers’ findings and organizational culture properties further. Therefore, the study is not eligible for this analysis. In her thesis, Aasi ( 2016 , pp. 56–57) discusses six papers with an organizational culture influence on the IT governance’s strategic alignment area. Part of them also found entrance in the paper. However, Aasi does not explicitly further examine the relationship, why her thesis is not part of the literature analysis at hand. Also, M. S. A. El-Mekawy ( 2016 , pp. 7–8) only cites a few papers. Finally, Rusu and Jonathan ( 2017 , p. 38) only cite two studies with organizational culture as an influencing factor for the alignment in public organizations. Nevertheless, both papers lack transparent culture or alignment concepts and will not be further analyzed here.

Table 5 shows the compiled studies about the relationships between culture and alignment sorted by type of study, author, and publication year. The collection consists of two literature reviews, one single case study, three multiple case studies, one focus group paper, and nine surveys. This differentiation is notable for the generalization purposes of the studies’ findings.

The table gathers the papers with their organizational culture dimensions, alignment concepts, and critical arguments and findings.

The following discussion reflects the findings of the quantitative and qualitative analyses regarding this paper’s research questions.

Results of the quantitative analyses

The research on organizational culture and strategic alignment in information technology depicted a growing interest over time (Fig.  3 ). This finding confirms the most crucial IT management concerns (Kappelman et al. 2013 , p. 228; Luftman et al. 2013 , p. 357). Furthermore, the quality of the sources (Table 4 ), the most apparent terms (Fig.  4 ), and their co-occurrences (Fig.  5 ) reveal the relevance of the research topics . However, the co-occurrence network (Fig.  5 ) shows that strategic alignment and organizational culture are not tightly related. This finding indicates a knowledge and research gap in the literature.

Findings of the qualitative analysis of the selected literature

The findings of the analyzed studies about organizational culture and alignment vary in characteristics and magnitudes (Table 5 ). We discuss the papers regarding the types of studies in the following.

Chan and Reich’s ( 2007 ) review is still valid and an often-cited work that gives an overview of the most common alignment concepts and discusses culture. Aasi and her colleagues ( 2017 ) present another literature review ten years later. They assessed the references on the relationship between culture and the IT governance’s five focus areas, of which strategic alignment is one of them. Aasi et al. ( 2017 , p. 22) confirm this study’s assumptions that organizational culture and alignment examinations are rare; their questions declare that the investigated papers lack decent knowledge about how different culture dimensions affect IT governance.

Most of the case studies examined information systems implementations. Thereby, Ravishankar et al. ( 2011 ) come to this study’s research questions the nearest. Although with a specific subcultural focus, they found an influence of organizational culture on a system’s alignment and implementation in a large Indian, globally active IT services and consulting company. Boekhoff ( 1999 ) refers to Schein’s three levels of culture (Schein and Schein 2017 ). The study is one of the earlier papers that acknowledges that the success of IT implementation and business-IT alignment is also a function of organizational culture, not only technology. Jing-hua et al. ( 2010 ) describe even more robust relationships between business-IT alignment and organizational culture regarding the acceptance of IT applications. Finally, Campbell et al. ( 2005 ) emphasize that business and IT management leaders and teams should encourage communication and collaboration to achieve strategic alignment.

The survey studies apply an adoption of Cameron and Quinn’s ( 2011 ) Competing Values Framework (Amar and Ben Romdhane 2019 ; Wang et al. 2021 ), the antecedent theory of Quinn and Spreitzer ( 1991 ) (Shao 2017 , 2019 ), or comparable culture models (Bi et al. 2013 , 2017 ). On the strategic alignment side, the concepts vary more. Amar and Ben Romdhane ( 2019 ) succeeded in answering their research questions, like those in this study. By measuring alignment with various adapted scales, they state that organizational culture, especially the clan culture type, potentially determines the information systems’ strategic alignment. Other studies reveal the influence of market-oriented (Bi et al. 2013 , 2017 ) and hierarchical culture (Wang et al. 2021 ) on business process alignment .

Table  6 gathers the studies with a particular emphasis on organizational culture characteristics. Again, the papers use the organizational culture constructs as independent variables, except for Shao ( 2017 ,  2019 ) and Wang et al. ( 2021 ), in which organizational culture is in a moderating position.

Most investigations argue that culture is flexible while maintaining employee or human relationships , communication and information , personnel empowerment , and team orientation . Column a of Table 6 reveals these notions and assignments. In terms of the Competing Values Framework (Cameron and Quinn 2011 ), this matches the organizational culture type of a clan . With considerable flexibility and discretion, the clan is like an extended family, where people share a lot of themselves (Cameron and Quinn 2011 , p. 48).

Also often are change readiness , innovation , or risk-taking , in studies assigned to b , and market orientation with achievement , power , competition dominance , and growth-accent in column c . The first words under b match the adhocracy culture as an entrepreneurial environment that welcomes venturing and readiness for change (Cameron and Quinn 2011 , p. 51). The second under c fits the market culture type with stability and control and the core values of competitiveness and productivity (Cameron and Quinn 2011 , p. 44).

To a lesser magnitude, follow (un)certainty , consistency , and efficiency orientation ( d ), and top management leadership ( e ). Regarding the Competing Values Framework, the first notions under d meet the hierarchy culture with the aim of a smooth running and coordinated organization (Cameron and Quinn 2011 , p. 42).

So, the organizational culture characteristic variables and constructs fit the Competing Values Framework (Cameron and Quinn 2011 ), also presented by Chtourou Ben Amar and Ben Romdhane ( 2019 , pp. 98–99).

Conclusions

This study systematically reviewed information technology management’s typical organizational culture and business-IT alignment. Therefore, it applied the PRISMA statement (Jackson et al. 2015 ; Moher et al. 2009 ). This method helped screen, select, and illuminate the eligibility process of the literature for further examination. After refining the search results with appropriate document types, research categories, subject areas, and keywords, the study analyzed the references. The bibliometrics’ science mapping showed the research topic’s relevance and possible gaps. The quantitative analyses told us nothing about the IT management’s organizational culture characteristics, i.e., this paper’s first research question. However, since the meaningful terms organizational or corporate culture and strategic alignment were not tightly related, this result indicated a research gap regarding the contribution of culture to business-IT alignment. The full-text analysis of a few eligible papers revealed that a relationship between IT management culture and business-IT alignment exists. This finding appeared in the case and survey studies about implementing information systems. For example, those studies reported a clan—in terms of Cameron and Quinn’s ( 2011 ) Competing Values Framework (CVF), people in IT see themselves as belonging to an extended family— a market-oriented or a hierarchical organizational culture. Such IT management culture characteristics significantly influence the alignment of business and IT. However, most studies used general alignment definitions and did not apply decent models, such as Henderson and Venkatraman’s ( 1993 ) Strategic Alignment Model (SAM).

Besides these theoretical implications, this paper contributes methodologically to the conduction of literature reviews. Notably, the choice of the search databases is delicate. The Web of Science collection is of the highest reported quality (Aria et al. 2020 , p. 807), but the results are somehow restricted. If the research questions are concrete and the research gap apparent, the Web of Science is suitable. For exploratory studies as the paper at hand, the addition of Scopus and Google Scholar is beneficial, considering their specific limitations. However, the researcher’s most significant challenges are combining the search terms, i.e., the appropriate application of Boolean operators and the innovative refining of the relevant literature.

This article has certain limitations . Although highly systematic, the research procedure with the included/excluded search terms and the refining of the search results are subjective. Reliability and validity would improve if this article relied on similar studies or called for the support of other scholars or experts. Nevertheless, we provided the reader with a transparent search strategy and review protocol. Then, the bibliometric analyses relied on one particular software solution. Although the applied tool is regularly maintained and builds upon open-source statistical packages, the procedure needed manual interventions. Finally, the qualitative analysis of the eligible papers provided only a snapshot of the relationship between organizational culture and business-IT alignment and would require further examination.

What are the learnings since Chan and Reich ( 2007 )? Fifteen years later, business-IT alignment still fascinates scholars to a large extent. As Table 5 depicts, the research subjects range from IT governance, strategic alignment, and strategic planning to social elements, such as communication and relationship management. On the organizational culture’s side, the properties vary as well. Nevertheless, the dimensions and scales often rely on examined constructs and models, such as Schein’s culture levels ( 2017 , p. 18), Denison and Mishra’s ( 1995 , p. 216) cultural traits, or Cameron and Quinn’s ( 2011 ) CVF. This paper finds a mixture, not a one-fits-all solution regarding the first research question about typical IT organizational culture characteristics. However, most examined studies use terms and notions that best match the CVF.

The relationship between organizational culture and business-IT alignment is more complicated than the individual business-IT alignment and organizational culture characteristics on their own. The literature review shows for this study’s second research question that the cultural influences on business-IT alignment achievements are weak, punctual, very situational, and lack distinct theoretical and empirical underpinnings. Future research will benefit from systematically applying established models, such as the CVF and SAM. Although the examined studies repeatedly focus on information technology issues at the management and firm level, only a few are about the concrete relationship between organizational culture and business-IT alignment.

So, the contribution of this paper to the body of knowledge is merely incremental but scientifically valuable (Corley and Gioia 2011 ). Hence, the article calls for further investigations in explaining and measuring the research questions. It proposes to apply the CVF and SAM systematically. The two orthogonal models give a comprehensive picture of their respective research topics of organizational culture and business-IT alignment (see Figs.  1 and 2 ). Moreover, their juxtaposition implies that both models and corresponding dimensions relate to each other.

Consequently, the CVF influences the SAM, and the CVF culture types affect the SAM perspectives. First, the market culture with its external focus and the need for stability and control fits the business strategy with its external orientation and functional integration. Second, the adhocracy culture type and the IT strategy strategic alignment perspective are both outward- and differentiation-oriented. The adhocracy culture highlights flexibility and discretion and equals the IT strategy, which helps the business acquire new IT competencies and technologies. This matching is quite similar to the tightrope walk of IT management, which simultaneously supports IT innovation and business transformation (Chan and Reich 2007 , p. 312). Third, the clan ’s internal and integrative perspective suits the IS infrastructure and processes with an internal IT focus. For example, managers of small and medium enterprises should support their IT and its strategy and actively seek strategic alignment (Chan and Reich 2007 , p. 312). Finally, the internal- and stability-oriented hierarchy culture harmonizes with the organizational infrastructure and processes , which align IT services to the business. So, further qualitative and quantitative analyses of these relationships can enlighten this paper’s research focus.

Data availability

The authors provide the data on request.

Code availability

The authors provide the R  code on request.

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Sieber, M.R., Malý, M. & Liška, R. Conceptualizing organizational culture and business-IT alignment: a systematic literature review. SN Bus Econ 2 , 120 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s43546-022-00282-7

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Understanding organisational culture for healthcare quality improvement

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• Russell Mannion , professor 1 ,
• Huw Davies , professor 2
• 1 Health Services Management Centre, University of Birmingham, Birmingham, UK
• 2 School of Management, University of St Andrews, St Andrews, UK
• Correspondence to: R Mannion r.mannion{at}bham.ac.uk

Russell Mannion and Huw Davies explore how notions of culture relate to service performance, quality, safety, and improvement

Key messages

Organisational culture represents the shared ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving in healthcare organisations.

Healthcare organisations are best viewed as comprising multiple subcultures, which may be driving forces for change or may undermine quality improvement initiatives

A growing body of evidence links cultures and quality, but we need a more nuanced and sophisticated understandings of cultural dynamics

Although culture is often identified as the primary culprit in healthcare scandals, with cultural reform required to remedy failings, such simplistic diagnoses and prescriptions lack depth and specificity

If we believe the headlines, health services are suffering epidemics of cultural shortcomings. Extensive enquiries into failures and scandals in the NHS over several decades have indicated aspects of hospital culture as leading to those failings . ( box 1 ). 1 2 The recent report into over 450 premature deaths at Gosport War Memorial Hospital mentions culture 21 times. 3 After such reports, widespread and fundamental cultural change is typically prescribed as the remedy ( box 1 ). 4 5

Centrality of culture to healthcare scandals: from Kennedy to Francis

From Ian Kennedy’s review of the failings in paediatric cardiac surgery in Bristol during the 1980s and 90s 2 to Robert Francis’s inquiry into the systemic failings at Mid Staffordshire Hospital Trust over a decade later, 1 culture has been implicated.

Culture as culprit

“There was an insular ‘club’ culture [at Bristol], in which it was difficult for anyone to stand out, to press for change, or to raise questions and concerns” (p302) 2

“Aspects of a negative culture have emerged at all levels of the NHS system. These include: a lack of consideration of risks to patients, defensiveness, looking inwards not outwards, secrecy, misplaced assumptions of trust, acceptance of poor standards, and, above all, a failure to put the patient first in everything done” (p2357) 1

Culture as remedy

“The culture of healthcare, which so critically affects all other aspects of the service which patients receive, must develop and change” (p277) 2

“The extent of the failure of the system shown in this inquiry’s report suggests that a fundamental culture change is needed” (p65) 1

Ideas of culture are also central to quality improvement methods. From basic clinical audit to sustained improvement “collaboratives,” business process re-engineering, Lean Six Sigma, the need for cultural reorientation is part of the challenge. 6 Yet although the language of organisational culture—sometimes culprit, sometimes remedy, and always part of the underlying substrate at which change is directed—has some immediate appeal, we should ask deeper questions. What actually is culture in health services? How does culture relate to healthcare quality, safety, and performance? And can changing culture lead to improvements in care and organisational performance?

Greater specificity around both culture and performance enables us to understand more precisely the possible relations between them: quality improvement work is ill served by broadbrush accounts of culture and service quality. We seek to move past the use of culture as simply a rhetorical tool used by politicians and in policy edicts. Instead, we outline a more nuanced account of the social dynamics of healthcare services.

What is culture in this context?

Healthcare organisational culture (from here, just culture) is a metaphor for some of the softer, less visible, aspects of health service organisations and how these become manifest in patterns of care. The study of organisational practices derives from social anthropologists’ approaches to the study of indigenous people: both seek to unravel the dynamics of unfamiliar “tribes.” The view that culture can be managed to remedy past deficits and produce desirable future outcomes is often smuggled in through this re-application of the ideas of culture to organisations. This view needs some critical scrutiny, 5 one that explores a more nuanced account of organisational culture in healthcare.

In one common framing, 7 the shared aspects of organisational life—the culture—are categorised as three (increasingly obscured) layers ( box 2 ). First, and most visible, are the physical artefacts and arrangements, as well as the associated behaviours that get things done. These visible manifestations of culture are seen in how estate, equipment, and staff are configured and used, and in the range of behaviours seen as normal and acceptable. These include the embedded and accepted care pathways, clinical practices, and communication patterns, sometimes referred to as “the way things are done around here.”

Three levels of organisational culture in healthcare 7 8

Visible manifestations of healthcare culture include the distribution of services and roles between service organisations (such as the long established divides between secondary and primary care and between health and social care), the physical layouts of facilities (receptionists behind desks and doctors in consulting rooms), the established pathways through care (including the ubiquitous outpatients appointment), demarcation between staff groups in activities performed (and the tussles that challenge or reinforce these), staffing practices and reporting arrangements, dress codes (such as different coloured scrubs for different staff groups in emergency departments), reward systems (pay and pensions, but also the less tangible rewards of autonomy and respect), and the local rituals and ceremonies that support approved practices. Visible manifestations of culture (sometimes called artefacts) also include the established ways (both formal and informal) of tackling quality improvement and patient safety, the management of risk, and the accepted ways of responding to staff concerns and patient feedback or complaints.

Shared ways of thinking include the values and beliefs used to justify and sustain the visible manifestations above and their associated behaviours, as well as the rationales put forward for doing things differently. This might include prevailing views on patient needs, autonomy, and dignity; ideas about evidence for action; and expectations about safety, quality, clinical performance, and service improvement.

Deeper shared assumptions are the (largely unconscious and unexamined) underpinnings of day-to-day practice. These might include ideas about appropriate professional roles and delineations; expectations about patients’ and carers’ knowledge and dispositions; and assumptions about the relative power of healthcare professionals—collectively and individually—in the health system.

The second level is the shared ways of thinking that are used to justify the visible manifestations ( box 2 ). This includes the beliefs, values, and arguments used to sustain current patterns of clinical practice. In this way, the local clinical culture is expressed not only through what is done, but also how it is talked about and justified.

Deeper still, and thus much less overt and accessible, are the largely unspoken and often unconscious expectations and presuppositions that underpin both dialogue and clinical practice (the shared assumptions; box 2 ). Such attitudes may be formed early, go deep, and be less amenable to modification.

These three levels are linked, of course, but not simply. Some of the deeper values and assumptions are taught in early professional education (the so-called hidden curriculum), reinforced through ongoing professional interactions, and then made visible as accepted practices. Other cultural manifestations are created or shaped externally, perhaps by the macro policy environment (for example, service configurations or reward systems), but over time these can influence shared ways of thinking and even deeper assumptions (about who or what is valued, for example). As healthcare becomes more global, with regular movement of care staff across national borders, major shapers of the cultural aspects of care may also include national, ethnic, or religious cultures.

Organisational culture, then, covers how things are arranged and accomplished, as well as how they are talked about and justified—that is, the stories and narratives about what is done and why, and the presuppositions that underpin these. Taken together these can reflect a shared and commonly understood view of hospital life manifested in patterns of care, safety, and risk. Although we focus on the hospital environment here, these arrangements and narratives are found (albeit in different forms) across all healthcare organisations from general practices to community trusts. Those wishing and situated to improve services need a sophisticated understanding of the social dynamics and shared mental schema that underpin and reinforce existing practices and inform their readiness to change.

An important additional layer of complexity is that shared mental schema may be confined to subgroups within care services, with important implications for patient experience and service delivery.

One culture or many subcultures?

Healthcare organisations are notoriously varied, fractured by specialty, occupational groupings, professional hierarchies, and service lines. Some cultural attributes might be widespread and stable, whereas others may be shared only in subgroups or held only tentatively. Important subcultures are delineated most obviously, as professional groups, and the faultlines are most obvious as these groups compete for resources and status. 9 Other subcultures can emerge over time. Some staff groupings may excel at articulating and enacting desirable values and practices, which may be helpful to organisational goals; for example, specialist teams or centres of excellence. Less helpfully perhaps, other subgroups may actively work to undermine changes promoted from external sources (often construed as countercultures). Whether such countercultures reflect unwarranted resistance to change or a more appropriate defence of enduring values may be hard to discern and depends on both perspective and context.

Hospitals, then, are a dynamic cultural mosaic made up of multiple, complex, and overlapping subgroups with variably shared assumptions, values, beliefs, and behaviours. Two of the major professional groupings concerned with quality improvement—doctors and managers—may differ in several important ways, for example. Doctors may focus on patients as individuals rather than groups and view evidence through a positivist natural sciences lens. Managers may be more concerned with patients as groups and value a social science based experiential perspective. 10 These cultural divergences have important implications for collaborative work, especially for people in hybrid roles who may either retain a cultural allegiance to their base group or seek to adopt the cultural orientations of their new role. They also form an important target for purposeful cultural reform, which might sometimes seek to strengthen current trends or at other times to inhibit them.

In sum, specific subcultures may be powerful catalysts for innovation and improvement or defenders of the status quo (for good or ill); they can be useful safeguards against risk or covert countercultures quietly undermining necessary reforms. Making sense of this subcultural diversity should be an essential part of any cultural “diagnosis” in seeking quality improvement.

Can culture be assessed and managed?

There are two distinctive views of culture. The first is optimistic about the potential for purposive cultural management, seeing culture as something that an organisation has— an attribute that can be assessed and manipulated to improve care. By contrast, the second view is more concerned with securing insights about organisational dynamics, without focusing on whether they can be manipulated. It sees organisational culture as something the organisation simply is — an account of local dynamics not readily separable from the organisational here-and-now.

These two perspectives take us down different routes of assessing and managing local healthcare cultures. The first emphasises the use of metrics to assess the prevalent organisational culture around a performance domain, such as patient safety. This approach assumes that a strong “safety culture” is associated with better outcomes for patients. Such measures may identify targets for managed change, and repeated measurement may be used to gauge progress against cultural objectives, with the hope that improvements in care will follow (for example, the Safety Attitude Questionnaire; box 3 ). Many such tools exist to assess different aspects of culture, although the science behind them is often weak 11 and their reliability and validity are questionable. 12

Two examples of culture assessment tools directed at patient safety

The Safety Attitude Questionnaire (SAQ) is a major (quantitative) assessment tool developed in the United States and widely used in the NHS to help organisations assess their safety culture and track changes over time. The SAQ is a reworking and refinement of a similar tool widely used in the aviation industry. There are various versions of the SAQ, but these typically comprise some 60 survey items, designed in the form of five point Likert scales, in six safety related domains: safety climate; team work; stress recognition; perceptions of management; working conditions; and job satisfaction. Completed by individuals, scores are then aggregated to give an indication of the overall strength of the organisation’s extant safety culture.

The Manchester Patient Safety Framework is a facilitative (qualitative) educational tool. It aims to provide insight into safety culture and how it can be improved among teams and organisations. The tool explores nine dimensions of patient safety and describes what an organisation would look like at different levels of patient safety. Assessment is carried out in facilitator-led workshops, and the assessments can be used to prompt reflections, stimulate discussions, and understand strengths and weaknesses.

The second view seeks to explore local cultural dynamics, often working through dialogue and perhaps using images and narratives rather than measurement instruments. This view is more modest about the potential for manager-led purposeful change but may still see cultural assessment as part of an overall influencing strategy (for example, the Manchester Patient Safety Framework; box 3 ).

Although both perspectives draw on assessment tools, they do so for different reasons: the first emphasising quantitative measurement to identify targets for change and to track progress (a summative approach); the second using qualitative insights more discursively to prompt reflection, learning, and shared actions (a more formative strategy). In practice, many researchers, organisational leaders, and quality improvement specialists will seek insights from across these approaches, despite the (at times uncomfortable) accommodations needed between their divergent assumptions.

Does culture matter?

It seems obvious that the shared, cultural aspects of organisational life must have some bearing on organisational outcomes. Yet because of the complexity of healthcare cultures and the ambiguity around health service “success,” establishing such links through research is not easy. 13 Nonetheless, the most recent systematic review of work in this area found a “consistently positive association . . . between culture and outcomes across multiple studies, settings, and countries.” 14 So, culture does seem to matter. Individual studies can also offer important actionable insights, such as on the importance of leadership, the need for balanced cultures, and on the contingent nature of the relationships between culture and performance ( box 4 ).

Insights from empirical study of the links between culture and care

The importance of leadership.

A recent intervention study (Leadership Saves Lives) focused on leadership actions to promote positive changes in organisational culture in 10 hospitals in the US. It found that changes in culture over a two year period varied substantially between hospitals. 15 16 In the hospitals that experienced substantial and positive cultural shifts, changes were most prominent in specific domains, such as perceptions of the learning environment, senior management support, and psychological safety. Hospitals with marked positive shifts in culture also experienced significant decreases in risk-standardised mortality rates (in this case for treatment of acute myocardial infarction). These findings from the US show which elements of culture need attention from hospital leaders—in particular, fostering a learning environment, offering sustained and visible senior management support to clinical teams, and ensuring that staff across the organisation feel “psychologically safe” and able to speak up when things are felt to be going wrong.

The need for balanced cultures

Research has shown that, in addition to cultural types, the balance between different cultures is important. Shortell, for example, found that, in a sample of chronic illness management teams, balance among team members relating to the cultural values of participation, achievement, openness to innovation, and adherence to rules and accountability was positively associated with both the number and depth of changes aimed at improving the quality of care. 17

The appearance of contingent relationships

The research indicates that there is no single “best” culture that always leads to success across the full range of performance domains. Instead, the aspects of performance valued in a given culture are enhanced in organisations with strong congruence with that culture. Early studies in Canadian, UK, and US hospitals found, for example, that hospitals with inwardly oriented cultures that emphasised managing through informal interpersonal relationships performed significantly above average on measures of employee loyalty and commitment than those with outward looking cultures. 18 Conversely, hospitals with outward looking cultures and procedural management performed better on measures of external stakeholder satisfaction. More recently, large scale longitudinal research in English NHS hospital trusts 19 replicated some of these findings.

The influence of the wider organisational environment

A qualitative case study of six NHS hospitals found clear differences in the cultural profile of “high” and “low” performing hospitals in terms of: leadership style and management orientation; accountability and information systems; human resource policies; and relations with other organisations in the local health economy. 20 Each of these provides potentially important targets for purposeful cultural change aimed at performance improvement.

Clearly, the relations between culture and quality, safety, or efficiency are unlikely to be straightforward. Culture, although important, offers no “magic bullet”—the challenge becomes one of understanding which components of culture might influence which aspects of performance.

Moreover, any relations between culture and health service outcomes are likely to be mutual and recursive: that is, perceived performance is as likely to shape local healthcare cultures as culture is to shape local healthcare performance. Virtuous circles of high performance leading to reinforcing cultures of high expectations may be seen, as can spirals into decline where perceived performance failings lead to demoralisation and resignation to those poor standards. 20 In these arguments, we can see how narrative practices about performance can have important effects on local cultures and that this has implications for clinician leaders, managers, and policy makers in how they talk about and manage performance and improvement.

Conclusions

Too often the term culture is used as a metaphor for something the organisation is thought to have. But acknowledging that culture is a complex construct can allow more judicious application of the concept. Paying greater attention to the multilayered and multifaceted complexity underlying the term—and recognising that many and varied cultural subgroups make up our healthcare organisations—opens new avenues for understanding the deeply social and discursive nature of complex organisations.

How these insights are used in quality improvement depends on both other conceptual framings of the healthcare setting, the aspect of service quality or performance to be improved, and on the precise nature of the quality improvement methods to be used. 6 For some framings and improvement methods, culture is key; for others, cultural aspects are in the background. Our view is that the cultural dimensions of organisations are an important substrate on which improvement focused change is being sought and that, although never fully manageable, cultures can be better understood and must be purposefully shaped.

Finally, the cultural framing of healthcare organisations draws attention to specific aspects of organisational life: the shared patterns of feeling, thinking, talking, and accomplishing that underpin local practice. In doing so, other equally important aspects of organisational life may be marginalised or neglected, such as individual skill, attitude, and responsibility; governance and performance management arrangements; the macro structural arrangements within which local service lines are embedded; the incentives spread across the system; and the availability of material resources, human capital, and knowledge. Each of these aspects interacts with and can sometimes overwhelm cultural features, with a resultant effect on the ability to shape and improve culture and services. The choice to focus improvement efforts on healthcare culture to the exclusion of, say, policy frameworks or resource constraints, inevitably has political ramifications, and these should be dealt with rather than ignored. Cultural reform in healthcare is no substitute for adequate resourcing. That said, the cultural perspective outlined here provides an insightful way of thinking and a practical set of tools to support wider quality improvement work in healthcare.

Competing interests: None declared.

Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

This article is one of a series commissioned by The BMJ based on ideas generated by a joint editorial group with members from the Health Foundation and The BMJ , including a patient/carer. The BMJ retained full editorial control over external peer review, editing, and publication. Open access fees and The BMJ ’s quality improvement editor post are funded by the Health Foundation.

This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ .

• ↵ Francis R. The Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust public inquiry. 2013. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/report-of-the-mid-staffordshire-nhs-foundation-trust-public-inquiry
• ↵ Kennedy I. The Report of the Public Inquiry into children’s heart surgery at the Bristol Royal Infirmary 1984-1995. Learning from Bristol. 2001. https://psnet.ahrq.gov/resources/resource/5187/learning-from-bristol-the-report-of-the-public-inquiry-into-childrens-heart-surgery-at-the-bristol-royal-infirmary-1984-1995
• ↵ Gosport Independent Panel. Gosport War Memorial Hospital: the report of the Gosport independent panel. 2018. https://www.gosportpanel.independent.gov.uk/
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Managing Organizational Culture Essay

Introduction.

In managing an entity, the organisational culture plays a vital role to its success. In reality, the organisation is an amalgamation of different people with varied cultures, which interact to produce a particular and distinct culture(s) that the company has to uphold. Organisations could have one or more cultures as long as those practices could lead to its success.

Essentially, the management has the mandate to make sure that the culture(s) that the entity adopts, are non-controversial or do not impede the articulation of the organisational goals. In this paper, the focus is on two important aspects of organisational management. First, it discusses the degree to which the organisational culture could be managed. Secondly, it seeks to establish whether the organisational culture is critical to its success.

Meaning of Organisational Culture

According to E. Ogbonna and L. Harris, organisational culture is a set of behavior and practices that the company adopt in the productions system in order to achieve success while accomplishing the objectives of the organisation (Ogbonna & Harris, 1998).

Effectiveness of Organisational Culture

In companies, the organisational culture only becomes effective if its leads to profit maximisation in the entity. A sustainable organisation would have effective policies to ensure that the organisational culture(s) are not used in the interest of the individuals, but would be used wisely for the benefit of all.

In addition, authentic sustainability could be attained if the company management is willing to explore the emerging new cultural practices, which offer more positive impacts to the organisation (Ogbonna & Harris, 1998). Adherence to such cultural practices would be the best mechanism to evaluate the effectiveness of the organisation culture.

For the organisation to achieve the desired state of the art cultural environment, it would have to ensure that it minimizes the manner in which the entity segregates its employees. Notably, this management practice would result in unity of the organisation where all stakeholders accept and abide by the cultural practice in the company.

Many administrators in the organizations have resorted to using certain cultural connotations that can be eliminated in order to realize the dream of sustainability, a situation showing the effectiveness of the organisational culture (Ogbonna & Harris, 1998). Environmental friendly cultures would also lead to interaction of the diversities to develop a way of practice that might lead the organisation to prosperity.

An entity should therefore ensure that the cultural attributes, which are likely to ground the company operations are not allowed. In this case, the organization would also advocate for cultures that are less harmful to the company operations (Werbach, 2009). Organizations that accept and embrace particular culture(s) are easily manageable and could lead it to triumph. For instance, the practices that could create conflict among the employees must be discouraged in totality (Werbach, 2009).

Ethical Culture

The ethical behavior that that organization applies in order to make sure that it maintains proper relations with its clients, among the employees and with the organization at large would be referred to as organization ethical culture.

Thus, the organization employees and other stakeholders ought to behave in a way that is in line with both the law of the country and the business ethical codes. In every business, ethics policy touching on culture should be implemented to guarantee the presence of togetherness between consumers and other workers in the organizations.

For sustainability reasons, the organization must ensure that it builds and maintains its cultural status and trust for the company. Therefore, even though the culture of the organization would have an impact on noteworthy, it should ensure sustainability is tied to organisation strategy. Some of the ethical cultures in the organisation include honesty, communication, commitment, discipline, and non-discrimination among others.

Managing Organisational Culture

The greatest concern of any organisation manager would be to address effectively the cultural issues that could make the organisation unsustainable. Managers and leaders in the organisation would only be confident when there are prospects indicating that the organisation would be sustainable (Ackroyd & Crowdy, 1990).

However, the cultural environment in which the organisation operates would be very dynamic. Organisation environment has numerous forces, institutions and factors that for instance would be beyond the organisation control and would affect the functioning of the entire organisation.

Before the 21 st century, organisation managers would only consider profit motive as the greatest function of sustainability, than addressing the cultural issues, which also have adverse effects in its management (Ackroyd & Crowdy, 1990. In managing the cultural problems, the leadership in organisation should work very hard to ensure that the cultural diversity is adequately addressed.

This approach would make sure that the problems related to cultural confrontations are minimised and subsequently eliminated in the entity. The leaders also believe that if an entity fail to resolve cultural conflict over years, it would be unsustainable due to anticipated wrangles over ethnic affiliations.

In this regard, for the organisation to sustain itself the management would ensure there are strategies to regulate organisation behaviour and subsequent culture (Ackroyd & Crowdy, 1990). Sustainability would be equated to profitability, meaning that the culture of the organisation must be inclined to this trend.

The ideology has since changed due to the complexities in the organisation culture and environment. Current managers deal with a myriad of cultural issues in order to ensure sustainability and human relationship to the natural world would overtake profit motive in priority.

In today’s organisational environment, managers are much more concerned with the cultural problems and influence on the company, thereby contribute on ways of minimising them.

Therefore, the managers had realized that the underlying reason for sustainability would be drawn from the analysis of organization’s effect on, and reaction to culture. In the company, there are cultures associated with the relationship among the different stakeholders so that the organisation could sustain the production with minimal conflicts (Ogbonna & Harris, 1998).

Previously, the managers would externalize the cultural interplay in the organisation, and failed to note that the employees in the company are the major agents of cultural dynamics. This means it is the managers should adopt policies, which can bring together and harmonise the cultural differences among the players in the organisation without prejudice.

Research shows that externalization of these cultural contributions to the organisation, without solving the internal problems related to the employee’s cultural practices would only increase the negative effects of organisational culture on the workers’ performance (Ogbonna & Harris, 1998).

Externalization of the organisational cultural influences would also threaten the manner in which the entity would operate as well as weakening the social support systems. Notably, the current cultural amalgamation in the organisation is responsible for harmonising the ethnic orientations, thus creating a cultural friendly environment that would expose certain workplace cultures.

The managers should evaluate the impacts of cultures on the workers performance and adopt ways, which are not detrimental to the entity. In this case, the cultural factors that threaten the production process could be dealt with without externalising them.

In an organisation setup, the concept of externalizing the cultural problems shows the inefficiency and limit entail the achievement of growth and success. The organisation would be sustainable only if it would ensure that the systems, and policies employed, would not be controversial to the articulation of company policies.

A sustainable organisation is the one that accepts and harmonizes the cultural diversities, which are found in the company in line with the organisational dominant culture (Ogbonna & Harris, 1998). This means the management should be in a position of add value to the employees other than segregating them on cultures.

There are organisation cultures, which would be encouraged if they help in educating workers, to achieve prosperity and give yield, and for road maintenance. All these would result from positive cultural attributes for within the environment.

In addition, these cultures that the company embraces must be documented in the company journals and scholarly article to aid studies about the company (Ogbonna & Harris, 1998). The entity would not pay anything towards the correction of cultural factors that emanates from its operations and employee interaction.

The cultures that would be evidenced in the organisation could eliminate the impacts of negative practices in firms, and such should be documented and presented in the financial accounts of the entity (Meek, 1988). For example, when inter-ethnic cultures clash in the company, then the people ways of life might be prioritized than the company goals, thus reducing productivity in the organisation.

Here, the management should take this cultural conflict as an organisation failure and this would gauge an entity’s level of sustainability (Ogbonna & Harris, 1998). The consequences of these actions would negatively affect the organisation and general public. The persons outside the entity would not be affected by the organisational culture since he/she does not interact with the management and other workers in the company (Willmott, 1993).

The cultural conflict in the organisation would make the innocent persons pay the price of such problems that they did not incur, and referred to as externalization of cultures. The condition would arise when the unrestrained company operations yield undesirable social results (Ogbonna, 1992). Moreover, consequences like other problems brought about by cultural differences in the work environment, the dangerous practices, for instance, incurs externalization of cultures (Ackroyd & Crowdy, 1990)

Essence of organisational culture

The organisational culture is essential because it helps the company become more sustainable. Progressive organisational culture encourages investors and promotes its development (Werbach, 2009). According to Smircich, the society and organisational cultural environments have become too oriented to making of profits than the environmental safety (Smircich, 1983).

In this regard, it is necessary to adhere to organisational practices that would make the company produce items, which are less hazardous to the environment. Since the steady application of the company culture might increase its production qualitatively and quantitatively, the management should resist and eliminate any cropping bad culture in the company (Meek, 1988).

Ogbonna suggested that the organisational culture either makes it productive or less productive depending on its management (Ogbonna, 1992). In this case, positive cultures improves the organisation’s credentials and popularity. This is essential because increasing cultural management practices would help the organisation reduce tension, making it viable and successful (Ogbonna, 1992).

Basically, ensuring that the employees embrace organisational culture is vital in ensuring that it progresses and becomes sustainable. The employees are the links between the company and its clients, meaning that the culture that they practice would affect the organisation (Willmott, 1993).

The organisation culture is vital as it helps in providing positive feedback and might enable the workers advise the company’s management about the likelihood of a given culture, either being suitable or unsuitable for the organisation (Meek, 1988).

Through appropriate organisational culture, the employees would always seek ways in which they can use to improve their efforts towards ensuring a balance between the individual and the company culture (Barney, 1986. In that aspect, they would achieve significant improvement by ensuring the resources at their disposal are used prudently (Meek, 1988).

Therefore, the organisation should only adopt cultures and production practices, which are appropriate and sustainable. Finally, organizational culture is also essential because it makes the employees use the resources of the company for its benefits and not that of the person (Barney, 1986).

In summary, cultural values, activities, and conduct of people are based on the moral principles of the organisation and ensures that it achieves the objectives. The organisation’s main concern is the cultural behavior of humans in determining the aspect that is right and wrong bearing in mind the accepted conduct and behavior of societies.

Lastly, for the organisation to maintain profit advances, productivity, progress to expansion, and thus sustainability of the organization, it should ensure it reduces its cultural interferences, as much as it maintains profits and productivity. In the end, they must produce quality products and build a reputable organization that people would want to work with and work for. The ethical culture of an organisation should be spelt in the company policy and all the workers should adhere to such guidelines while performing their duties.

Ackroyd, S. & Crowdy, P. (1990). “Can culture be managed? Working with “raw” material: The case of the English slaughtermen.” Personnel Review, 19(5), 3- 13.

Barney, J. (1986). “Organizational Culture: Can it be a source of sustained competitive advantage?” Academy of Management Review, 11(3), 656-665.

Meek, V. (1988). “Organizational Culture: Origins and Weaknesses.” Organization Studies 9(4), 453-473.

Ogbonna, E. (1992). “Managing Organizational Culture: Fantasy or Reality?” Human Resource Management Journal 3(2), 42-54.

Ogbonna, E. & Harris, L. (1998). “Managing Organizational Culture: Compliance or Genuine Change?’” British Journal of Management 9(4), 273-288.

Smircich, L. (1983). “Concepts of Culture and Organizational Analysis.” Administrative Science Quarterly , 28(3), 339-358.

Werbach, A. (2009). Strategy for Sustainability: An Organisation Manifesto. Harvard : Harvard Organisation Press.

Willmott, H. (1993). “Strength is ignorance; Slavery is freedom: Managing culture in modern organizations.” Journal of Management Studies, 30(4), 515-552.

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