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Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework
Kim S. Cameron and Robert E Quinn Addison-Wesley Publishing Company Reading, MA 1998 ISBN: 0201338718 US$43.00
(Addison-Wesley Series on Organization Development) Keywords Corporate culture, Organizational change, Organizational effectiveness, Evaluation, Individual behaviour
Early in this book, these authors press home their primary point: organizational culture matters, and it matters a great deal. It's not about what you produce or with whom you compete; if you want your organization to succeed in today's world, you need to manage your culture. Unfortunately, the journey to successful cultural management usually begins, by necessity, with cultural diagnosis and change - and that's where the path gets treacherous.
Cameron and Quinn note that those individuals most likely to be on this path - managers, change agents and scholars - are their intended audiences. Near the beginning of the book these authors list what they have to offer to these audiences: a theoretical framework, a sensemaking tool, a set of steps intended to induce change, and a measure designed to target needed individual changes. Their book therefore doubles both as a workbook, with diagnostic tools and activities embedded in the text, and a textbook of sorts, complete with a theoretical framework and detailed explanations of varied organizational cultures.
If you believe culture matters, where do you go from there? The authors suggest that first you need to know the current nature of your organizational culture, and then you need to consider how you want that culture to change. To generate this baseline information, the reader is encouraged to complete the organizational culture assessment instrument (OCAI), a questionnaire designed to elicit current and "should be" ratings across six dimensions (e.g. dominant characteristics, management style of employees) thought by the authors to be critical to understanding organizational culture. These dimensions originate from psychological archetypes, briefly explained in the text and in an Appendix. The skeptical reader is provided with additional references on this topic, but a more complete discussion of these archetypes and justification for their use would have been helpful.
To their credit, Cameron and Quinn provide a fairly comprehensive Appendix in which definitional and psychometric issues of the OCAI are discussed at length. While the information is of a scholarly nature,...