Methods of Measuring Organizational Culture

1188 Words5 Pages
Organizational culture can be defined as patterns of commonly held beliefs, values and behavioural assumptions within the organization that are adapted in solving problems and that serve to guide and focus attitudes, perception and behaviour (Schein, 1985). Organizational culture is considered to be one of the most significant factors in bringing and modernizing public administration and service delivery. As such it is a practical need to explore and measure organizational culture. Thus qualitative and quantitative methods are used to measure organizational culture. These methods that are used are self-assessment methods, ethnographic methods, and the use of archival information from the organisation as well as cognitive mapping. Self-report assessments which is a quantitative method can be used to measure organizational culture. This method is where by the assessor administers this measure to a sample of organizational employees and then create a numerical index to describe the culture (Jex, 2002). Questionnaire can be used as a method of self-assessment method to measure culture in an organization. Although there are many types of questionnaire used, an example is the Organizational Culture Profile (OCP). According to Jed (2002) the OCP measures culture primarily in terms of the values that tend to predominate within the organization. It measures specific values such as aggressiveness, innovation and detail orientation. The scores are then formed by aggregating individual employee’s rating, thus the organization’s unique culture is then uncovered by examining the patterns of the scores. The advantages of self-assessment method is that larger samples can be covered, it is not time consuming and also a lack of research skills among managers make a simple survey potentially easier to conduct . However, it is easy for items not contained within the questionnaires to
Open Document