Individual perceptions of culture and change: a unifying perspective on change-oriented organizational cultures
Date
2018
Authors
Weston, James W., author
Byrne, Zinta, advisor
Fisher, Gwen, committee member
Ganster, Dan, committee member
Graham, Dan, committee member
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Abstract
Organizational change has become a mainstay for today's organizations. Yet, organizational change efforts overwhelmingly represent unsuccessful and stressful events for both organizations and employees. Much of the extant literature on organizational change focuses on a modified culture as an outcome of change, but this ignores the potential for organizational culture itself to facilitate organizational change efforts by engendering an inherent value for organizational change in employees before changes even happen. I propose that one potential solution to unsuccessful change efforts is for organizations to adopt a change-oriented culture, making change acceptable rather than an obstacle to overcome. Because a changed culture is the typical change outcome, existing organizational culture frameworks are broad and therefore address organizational change (e.g., adaptive culture in the competing values framework, or learning organizations) in a cursory manner. Furthermore, these broad frameworks were developed in parallel yet isolated streams of research; hence, their value for predicting organizational change outcomes is limited. Therefore, to address failing organizational change efforts and disjointed culture frameworks, I synthesize the facets of existing organizational culture frameworks that focus on change to create and define a change-oriented culture. Data from multiple samples of a total of 963 Amazon's Mechanical Turk workers were used to test the psychometric properties of a new measure of change-oriented organizational culture. Structural equation modeling was used to assess the relationship of change-oriented organizational culture to its nomological network above and beyond existing cultural frameworks. Results from structural equation modeling indicated that change-oriented culture directly relates to organizational change attitudes, turnover intentions, and organizational commitment; indirectly relates to change-related behaviors through readiness for change; and indirectly relates to perceptions of change success through resistance to change. Moreover, change-oriented organizational culture related to change-related attitudes and organizationally relevant outcomes significantly better than the adhocracy dimension of the competing values framework, the innovative dimension of Wallach's organizational culture measure, and perceptions of learning organizational culture. However, both change-oriented organizational culture and perceptions of learning organizational culture related to affective commitment to change and organizational commitment equally well. This study advances the organizational culture literature by proposing a new theoretical orientation to change – that the culture can facilitate change efforts rather than simply serve as an outcome of change interventions – and furthermore, provides a first attempt at defining and collecting empirical data to support the validity of a change-oriented culture dimension.
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Subject
corporate culture
organizational change
readiness for change
job attitudes
commitment to change
organizational culture