Diagnosing organizational culture

Abstract

In today’s dynamic business environment concepts like organizational development, restructuring, and change management has become the most popular subjects. Although it has begun to loose some of its popularity, organizational culture is the basis for all these concepts. Since organizational culture is a concept that can hardly be defined and agreed upon, this study examines the different approaches to the definition and the different approaches on how to diagnose organizational culture. The four dimensional culture model; questionnaire developed by Harrison and Strokes is explained and applied to three companies operating in different sectors in order to obtain a general understanding of their existing and preferred culture orientations. The results indicate that the questionnaire is a valid tool to begin discussions on organizational culture. This study can be taken as the first step of a larger culture change project since it analyzes the differences between the existing and preferred culture orientations.