Can Questionnaires Measure Culture: Eight Extended Field-Studies.

Fifty managers and leaders of business and industry participated in a 2-year qualitative study to identify the elements of organizational culture (OC) that were most salient and potent in their judgment. These discussions provided the foundation for developing a multi-scale, self-administered survey of organizational culture (SOC). The SOC was administered by insider-managers to 492 people in 8 organizations, representing both public and private sectors in business and industry. Measures of job satisfaction and organizational commitment, and empirical indicators of organizational performance were taken concurrently. As an instrument, the SOC demonstrated acceptable or better levels of: (1) internal consistency of scales, (2) scale independence, (3) discriminant validity in relation to job satisfaction and organizational commitment scales administered concurrently, and (4) convergent validity in relation to organizational performance measures taken concurrently. As an approach to studying OC, the findings suggest that: (1) leaders and managers were in agreement with the OC dimensions identified by their peers, (2) leaders and managers were in agreement with the findings produced by the SOC methodology, and (3) the SOC methodology demonstrates sensitivity in several ways including greater between than within organization variance in all studies, and high correlations with the judgments of the insider-managers and leaders. Thirty-four references are listed and 7 tables present study information. (Author)