Parsing organizational culture: How the norm for adaptability influences the relationship between culture consensus and financial performance in high-technology firms
By Jennifer A. Chatman, D. Caldwell, Charles A. O'Reilly, Bernadette Doerr. 2014
216 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Summary The relationship between organizational culture and financial performance remains elusive even though researchers have studied it for some time. Early research suggested that a strong culture that aligns members’ behavior with organizational objectives boosts financial performance. A more recent view is that, because strong cultures promote adherence to routines and behavioral uniformity, they are less effective in dynamic environments. We suggest that the relationship between culture and performance can be reconciled by recognizing that culture encompasses three components: (1) the content of norms (norm content); (2) how widely members agree about norms (culture consensus); and (3) how intensely organizational members hold particular norms (norm intensity). We hypothesize that “strong cultures”—where a high consensus exists among members across a broad set of culture norms—can contribute to better financial performance even in dynamic environments if norm content intensely emphasizes adaptability. We test this hypothesis in a sample of large firms in the high-technology industry. Firms characterized by higher culture consensus and intensity about adaptability performed better three years later than did those characterized by lower consensus, lower intensity about adaptability, or both. We discuss how parsing culture into content, consensus, and intensity advances theoretical and empirical understanding of the culture–performance relationship. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Subfields: Anthropology, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c8790f18dd6b43f265c9f8ead4fcfe9bf813c2b0
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In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management
In Strategy and Management
Citations in the corpus
- Creativity from Constraint? How the Political Correctness Norm Influences Creativity in Mixed-sex Work Groups (2015, background): “Research has suggested that norms can be parsed into strength and content dimensions and that both must be simultaneously considered to understand their impact on group creativity (Goncalo and Duguid, 2012; Chatman et al., 2014).”
- Organizational Culture and Performance: Evidence From Microfinance Institutions in Kenya (2019, background): “In consistent with Choi et al. (2010), who argue that all types of culture are important predictors of performance, Chatman et al. (2014) conclude that all the four types of organizational culture based on CVF has significant positive influence on performance.”