Organizational culture and effectiveness: A study of values, attitudes, and organizational outcomes

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Abstract

That organizational culture influences firm effectiveness is an assumption implicitly held by many managers and management researchers, although few empirical studies have provided detailed insight into the relationship. This manuscript addresses this dearth of research by examining employee attitudes as a potential mediator of the relationship between organizational culture, as operationalized by the competing values framework [Quinn, R.E., Beyond Rational Management. San Francisco: Josey-Bass; 1988.], and diverse measures of organizational effectiveness. Results of this study, which was conducted in 99 healthcare facilities across the US, provide evidence that suggests that employee attitudes mediate the culture–effectiveness relationship.

Section snippets

The competing values framework and culture

While multiple conceptualizations of organizational culture can be found in the literature, we have adopted the competing values framework as it is perhaps the most popular approach to assessing culture where the interest is on relating culture to organizational performance. In an attempt to better understand the dimensionality of organizational effectiveness, Quinn and Rohrbaugh (1983) performed a spatial analysis of the relative similarity of several popular effectiveness measures. The

Sample

The top management team from 99 hospitals across the U.S. owned by a single parent company were asked to participate in the study. In most cases, the top management group comprised the Chief Executive Officer, Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, Chief Nursing Officer, Director of Business Development, Human Resources Director, Director of Marketing, and Business Office Manager. This study used the facility as the unit of analysis, and therefore the top management team of each

Hospital-level aggregation

In order to perform analyses at the hospital level, culture scales were aggregated to the hospital level by averaging individual responses. The amount of variance on each culture scale across informants from each hospital was measured by RWG (James et al., 1984). RWG provides a measure of variance across informants from a particular hospital standardized by the number of response alternatives on the items. An RWG greater than .70 has become an accepted benchmark of an appropriate level of

Discussion

The goal of this research was to address the direct and indirect impact of organizational culture on effectiveness. While much research has focused on the direct effects of culture on effectiveness (e.g., Denison, 1984, Denison and Mishra, 1995), there is a lack of research exploring the possible mediators of this relationship. This study finds support for the mediating effect of employee attitudes on the culture–effectiveness relationship.

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      According to the social exchange theory (Blau, 1964), group performance in an organization is improved by citizenship behaviors (Koys, 2001). This theory also explains the relationship between employee attitudes and effectiveness (Acquaah & Tukamushaba, 2015; Gregory, Harris, Armenakis, & Shook, 2009; Jha, Potnuru, Sareen, & Shaju, 2019; Organ, 1977), as satisfied employees reciprocate in ways that contribute to OE. The interdependency between engagement and effectiveness (Johnson, Nguyen, Groth, & White, 2018) can also be elaborated by social capital theory (Bourdieu, 1986), which dwells on the effective functioning of social groups through a shared sense of identity, trust, and values.

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