Climate and Culture for Innovation
Since the beginning of organisational research and practise, one of the most important goals has been to find ways to make organisations more effective through innovation. Early efforts to improve were firmly rooted in the industrial revolution and best exemplified by Frederick Taylor’s “scientific management” from 1911. This was based on the idea that organisational effectiveness is a function of individual work behaviours that are carefully specified, explicitly linked, and tightly controlled by organisational leaders to improve productivity and efficiency.
Even though later empirical studies and more complex views of work behaviour and performance disproved many of these early assumptions, Lisbeth Schorr (1997) wrote that almost a century later, the underlying philosophy of these mechanistic models was still visible in the way many human service organisations were run: “We are so eager, as a body politic, to eliminate the possibility that public servants will do anything wrong that we make it virtuous for them not to.”
Current empirically based models of organisational innovation and effectiveness go beyond the mechanistic models of a century ago, and many of them stress that innovation and effectiveness are as much about creating the right organisational social context as they are about using the latest technology. Many organisational leaders agree that an organization’s social context is linked to innovation and effectiveness, and organisational culture and climate are often cited as the most important factors that determine how well an organisation does in a wide range of areas.
Researchers, practitioners, and the news media have used the terms to explain organisational performance in fields like science (NASA), religion (Catholic Church), information technology (Google), athletics (NFL), healthcare (Veterans Administration), manufacturing (GM), media (BBC), finance (JP Morgan Chase), higher education (Penn State), and energy production (BP) (e.g. BP).
Even though the terms “culture” and “climate” are often used to explain how an organisation works in these and many other situations, administrators, researchers, and the media often use them in a vague or even wrong way. There is a lot of confusion about what the terms really mean and how they affect what organisations do. These are important issues for people who care about how well human service organisations do their jobs and who think that improving performance depends on a better understanding of organisational culture and climate.
First, the different histories of the two concepts show that there are different ways to figure out what an organization’s social context is and how it affects it. Organizational climate was first studied by Kurt Lewin in 1939, when he looked at how the social climate created by a work group’s leader affected the behaviour of the group’s members. He used the word “climate” to describe how the environment at work affects employees’ feelings of well-being, motivation, behaviour, and performance. In the 1970s, people started to study organisational culture, which is the shared norms, values, and expectations for how people act within an organisation.
The term “organisational culture” is based on sociological and anthropological explanations of social culture from research on communities, indigenous groups, and other socially defined groups. Inexplicably, some writers in the 1990s started to use “organisational culture” and “organisational climate” as if they were the same thing. However, a comprehensive thematic analysis of the literature in the late 1990s confirmed that “organisational culture” and “organisational climate” are still two different things.
How organisational culture and climate are different
After 30 years of studying culture and climate in human services, I think they are different in many ways. First, the norms and expectations of behaviour at work are the best way to describe an organization’s culture. These norms and expectations tell employees how to do their jobs in a certain work environment, set priorities, and shape how work is done. In effective organisational cultures, for example, service providers are expected to be up-to-date on the latest practises and to put the best interests of their clients first.
These expectations and norms are taught to new members of an organisational unit through social processes like modelling, reinforcement, and punishment. Many writers point out that organisational culture is a multi-layered concept made up of deeply held assumptions and values that translate into normative expectations and behaviour. Several studies, though, show that organisational culture is spread more through behavioural norms and expectations than through internalised values or assumptions that members of the organisation may or may not express or even know about.
Organizational climate, on the other hand, is made up of how employees feel their work environment affects their mental health and how well they can do their jobs. When employees in a given workplace have the same ideas about what their work means and how important it is, this means that they agree on what those ideas are. Psychological climate is different from organisational climate because it refers to how each worker thinks their work environment affects their personal well-being.
When people in the same work environment agree on how they think their work environment affects them psychologically, their shared opinions describe the organisational climate of that work environment. For example, the organisational climate is said to be stressful when all of the service providers in a given human services organisational unit agree that their work environment is very stressful.
Based on these definitions, the Organizational Social Context (OSC) measure was made to evaluate the organisational cultures and climates of mental health and social service organisations by using information from frontline direct service providers (Glisson, Green & Williams, 2012; Glisson, Landsverk et al, 2008). The OSC has been used in a lot of studies, like randomised controlled trials (RCTs) and nationwide surveys, and there are national norms for child welfare and mental health settings in the US. The national norms are important because they let profiles of an organization’s culture and climate be compared to a representative sample of organisations across the country that offer similar services.
Different parts of a company’s culture
The OSC looks at three things that make up a culture: proficiency, rigidity, and resistance. Service providers in organisations with good organisational cultures say they are expected to be responsive to the unique needs of the clients they serve and to have up-to-date knowledge and practise skills. Service providers in organisations with rigid cultures say they have to follow a lot of bureaucratic rules and regulations to do their jobs and have very little freedom to make decisions at work.
Service providers in resistant cultures are expected to keep their workplaces from changing or becoming more innovative by using active or passive strategies that keep things the same. Our studies show that organisations with high levels of proficiency and low levels of resistance and rigidity have the best results for clients, are most likely to use evidence-based practises (EBPs), have the best service quality, and keep innovative programmes going.
Factors that make up an organization’s climate
Engagement, functionality, and stress are the three parts of climate that the OSC looks at. In engaged organisational climates, service providers see their work-related accomplishments as personally meaningful and say they are personally involved in their work with clients. In functional climates, service providers feel that their coworkers and managers give them the support and cooperation they need to do their jobs.
They also know what their roles are in the organisation and how they contribute to its success. Service providers report a lot of role overload, role conflict, and emotional exhaustion when they work in environments that are stressful. Our studies show that organisations with high levels of engagement and functionality and low levels of stress have the best service outcomes, the lowest employee turnover, the best attitudes toward EBPs from clinicians, and the best service quality.