Research in Organizational Behavior - Berkeley-Haas

1 Paradigm lost: Reinvigorating the study of organizationalculture$Jennifer A. Chatmana,*, Charles A. O ReillybaHaas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, United StatesbGraduate School of Business, Stanford University, United StatesA R T I C L E I N F OArticle history:Available online xxxKeywords: Organizational cultureGroup normsCulture strengthAssessing Organizational cultureA B S T R A C TIn spite of the importance of Organizational culture, scholarly advances in ourunderstanding of the construct appear to have stagnated. We review the state of cultureresearch and argue that the ongoing academic debates about what culture is and how tostudy it have resulted in a lack of unity and precision in defining and measuring ambiguity has constrained progress in both developing a coherent theory oforganizational culture and accreting replicable and valid findings. To make progress weargue that future Research should focus on conceptualizing and assessing organizationalculture as the norms that characterize a group or organization that if widely shared andstrongly held, act as a social control system to shape members attitudes and behaviors.

2 Wefurther argue that to accomplish this, researchers need to recognize that norms can beparsed into three distinct dimensions: (1) the content or what is deemed important ( ,teamwork, accountability, innovation), (2) the consensus or how widely shared norms areheld across people, and (3) the intensity of feelings about the importance of the norm ( ,are people willing to sanction others). From this perspective we suggest how futureresearch might be able to clarify some of the current conflicts and confusion thatcharacterize the current state of the field. 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights A brief history of the early focus on Organizational culture .. 002. The downside of culture as a popular management fad .. 003. Roadblocks and distracting debates .. Disagreements about the definition of culture .. Predictive versus construct validity .. The Organizational culture versus climate debate.

3 Qualitative versus quantitative conceptions of culture .. Different quantitative approaches to studying Organizational culture .. 00$We are grateful to Art Brief, Glenn Carroll, and Barry Staw for theirinsightful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and Shan Dhaliwal forhelp with compiling references.* Corresponding addresses: ( ( O Reilly). 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights in Organizational Behavior xxx (2016) xxx xxxG ModelRIOB 97 No. of Pages 26 Please cite this article in press as: Chatman, O Reilly, Paradigm lost: Reinvigorating the study of Organizational culture, Research in Organizational Behavior (2016), lists available at ScienceDirectResearch in Organizational Behaviorjournal homepage: vie The Denison Organizational Culture Survey (DOCS) .. The Competing Values Framework (OCAI) .. The Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI) .. The Organizational Culture Profile (OCP).)

4 Integrated critique of the four assessments .. 004. A comprehensive theory of culture .. The importance of culture in organizations .. Culture in operation .. Distinguishing among culture content, intensity and consensus .. Conceptualizing culture strength: agreement and intensity .. The joint effects of culture content, consensus, and intensity .. Parsing norms to understand their nuanced behavioral manifestations .. 005. An agenda for future Organizational culture Research .. Relating culture to individual and Organizational performance .. Culture and strategy .. 006. Conclusions .. 00 References .. 00 Organizational researchers have been interested in therole of culture in Organizational life and by some estimateshave generated more than 4600 articles on the topic(Hartnell, Ou, & Kinicki, 2011). Managers have also recog-nized the importance of culture because of the presumedrelationship between certain types of Organizational cul-tures and effective Organizational performance ( , Alves-son & Sveningsson, 2015; Katzenbach, Steffen, & Kronley,2012; Lorsch & McTague, 2016).

5 In fact, a recent surveyshowed that 78% of Fortune 1000 CEO s and CFO s viewculture as one of the top three factors affecting their firm svalue (Graham, Harvey, Popadak, & Rajgopal, 2016). Despiteboth academic and practitioner interest, however, we lack aunified approach to understanding Organizational culture,one that identifies the sourcesof culturalvariation in groupsand organizations, its psychological basis, and the impact ithas on people and organizations. We suggest that this gap intheoretical clarity has arisen for two reasons. First,managerial interest in Organizational culture has generatedlucrative consulting opportunities that may have stuntedattempts in the academic arena to develop a precise,comprehensive, and robust theory of Organizational cul-ture. Second, debates about how to define and study culturehave ceased to be generative and instead, are constrainingour ability to accumulate and advance an integrative andcomprehensive theory of years after our first chapter on organizationalculture appeared in this series (O Reilly & Chatman, 1996),we take stock of the Organizational culture researchdomain.

6 We begin by offering a brief history of theevolution of Organizational culture as a Research area. Wethen consider the impact that an early interest amongpracticing managers has had on the evolution of theculture construct. We review theoretical and empiricalmodels of culture and the most salient debates, includingdistinctions between culture and Organizational climate,whether culture is appropriately studied qualitatively orquantitatively, and how culture is measured. We arguethat ongoing debates that are no longer fruitful be retiredso that theoretical progress can resume. We also suggestthat prior work has often been ill suited to isolate andmeasure culture precisely, leading to a widespread lack ofconstruct validity. We recommend that culture be definedin terms of its underlying psychological mechanism,which we identify as social norms that operate throughinformational and normative social influence.

7 Then, toadvance a theory of Organizational culture, we parse threecomponents of Organizational culture: norm content,norm consensus, and norm intensity, and argue that priorresearch has confounded these components and cloudedour understanding of how culture works, particularly therelationship between culture and Organizational perfor-mance. Armed with a robust theory of the mechanismsunderlying culture and linking it to individual andorganizational Behavior , we identify several promisingfuture directions for the domain; some of which involveconnecting with adjacent fields, and others that benefitfrom advances in computing capabilities enabling us toconsider larger samples and more dynamic analyticalapproaches to assessing culture and its impact on peopleand organizations. Our chapter, thus, aspires to reinvigo-rate an academic focus on Organizational culture, one thatidentifies and unlocks key mechanisms, antecedents, A brief history of the early focus on organizationalcultureIn the late 1970s and early 1980s managers and scholarsbecame interested in the topic of Organizational culture.

8 A series of poplar books ( , Davis, 1984; Deal & Kennedy,1982), academic conferences, and special issues ofscholarly journals (Administrative Science Quarterly, 1979,1983; Journal of Management, 1985; Journal of ManagementStudies, 1982) highlighted the promise of organizationalculture as a way to understand how people withinorganizations interact and how organizations operate toachieve their stated and unstated trace the study of Organizational culture back toa pioneering paper by Andrew Pettigrew in 1979,published in Administrative Science Quarterly. Culturalanthropologists had already developed a productiveparadigm, typically derived from case studies devotedto understanding norms and beliefs within different2 Chatman, O Reilly / Research in Organizational Behavior xxx (2016) xxx xxxG ModelRIOB 97 No. of Pages 26 Please cite this article in press as: Chatman, O Reilly, Paradigm lost: Reinvigorating the study of Organizational culture, Research in Organizational Behavior (2016), ( , Malinowski, 1944; White, 1949).

9 Pettigrew(1979) applied these ideas to an Organizational contextand focused on people as creators and managers ofmeaning. He viewed culture as relevant to the field oforganizational Behavior because it focused on howpurpose, commitment and order are created in the earlylife of an organization (p. 572). He defined culture as a system of publically and collectively accepted meaningsoperating for a given group at a given time (p. 574) andviewed culture as a means for cultivating commitmentamong members, particularly within new of the early interest in Organizational culturewas fueled, in part, by Japan s economic success ( ,Abegglen & Stalk, 1985; Cole, 1980; Ohmae, 1982). Japan seconomic performance when compared to the UnitedStates was striking, and it motivated researchers toexamine Japanese management practices as a potentialsource of their national economic performance ( ,Ouchi, 1981; Pascale & Athos, 1981).

10 For example, Lincolnand Kalleberg (1985) conducted a comparative study ofJapanese and American firms and noted that Japanesework structures and culture evoked feelings of commu-nity and pride (p. 740).. [I]t now appears thatJapanese work structures are the cutting edge of anevolving administrative rationality (p. 756) and that thegreater commitment of the Japanese workforce isattributable to Japanese management practices andorganizational structure (p. 757). Researchers alsopointed to Japanese corporations extensive use of long-term employment, social and recreational programs,symbols and rituals, and socialization and training whichincreased employees' involvement in the firm andintegrated employees into a tight network (Abegglen,1958; Dore, 1973; Marsh & Mannari, 1977; Rohlen, 1974).These practices created what was termed a strongculture. It was also around this time that the study ofculture provoked interest not just among academics butamong managers as well.