How can you understand where your company culture is currently at?
There are many frameworks and tools out there, but most are not fully complete in the sense that they do not allow you to define behaviours more specifically, nor do they help you do a behavioural and systematic analysis of the organization.
Nevertheless there are great thinking tools like the Competing Values Framework that can be of help you.
What is the CVF?
The Competing Values Framework originated from Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s research in 1983, aimed at identifying the factors that contribute to organizational effectiveness. Over the past two decades, it has been extensively applied to various aspects of individual and organizational behavior.
The framework shows different culture types:
-Clan Culture (Internal Focus, Flexibility): Focuses on collaboration, teamwork, employee development, and a family-like atmosphere.
-Adhocracy Culture (External Focus, Flexibility): Emphasizes innovation, creativity, risk-taking, and flexibility to adapt to changes.
-Market Culture (External Focus, Stability): Competitive, results-oriented, with a focus on achieving goals, profitability, and external success.
-Hierarchy Culture (Internal Focus, Stability): Structured, formalized environments with clear procedures, control, and efficiency.
Lets be clear, it is a simplification of complexity in an organization, hence why you need to understand the behaviours and the system - you can't get that understanding of complexity and relationships from just one framework like this.
It also does not give you the way to actually define behaviours and what could be driving the culture or how to develop interventions - but we have methods and tools for that (in the work we do at Aim For Behavior we develop our own, but there is lots out there to guide you)
That is where a behavioural science and mixed methods come in - we need more layers and better tools to understand culture, to make it tangible so we can maintain or develop new aspects of the culture we aspire to.
Image credit
Kim S. Cameron and University of Michigan Regents