Foreword

Much has happened in the field of organizational culture since the concept became theoretically and practically important in the 1980s. There were arguments about how to define it, how to measure it, and whether it was useful either as a construct in organization theory or as a correlate of organizational performance. The concept appealed to entrepreneurs because they saw themselves as creators of culture without always knowing just what they meant by that. The concept became important to leaders as a way of capturing all the soft stuff that they realized they had to think about and as a way of articulating their values. The concept played an increasing role in change theories, both as the biggest constraint on change and also as an element that had to change if real change were to be accomplished. The concept caught the fancy of theoreticians, who created instant typologies of different kinds of cultures. And the concept was immediately adopted by a number of social psychologists who wanted to measure it—whatever “it” was.

Among the early “measurers” was Dan Denison. His first culture book, Corporate Culture and Organizational Effectiveness (1990), showed that culture measures did relate to performance. In this new book, Denison and his colleagues have brought that whole approach to maturity and thereby have established a milestone in the culture studies arena. Through an analysis of a number of case studies of real culture change, they provide the reader with a useful and relevant measurement tool—built on relevant organization theory in its choice of dimensions to measure—and, most important, they show how the whole survey process integrates with an ongoing process of change.

The case studies show how working with culture both quantitatively and clinically can become the key to the major strategic and tactical change programs that organizations have to undertake in this ever more turbulent world. The book illustrates how effective culture measures have evolved and can be used creatively and responsibly. I say responsibly, because I have always been critical of those who used culture surveys when they simply assumed that they knew what to measure in the first place and then fed the results back to the organization without considering how this might help or hinder what the organization was trying to do.

What is presented in this book has come a long way from those early simplistic approaches. From the beginning, Denison was concerned with correlating culture dimensions with organizational performance, to impose a useful context for culture analysis. Culture is vast, but only some parts of a given organizational culture may be of relevance to what the organization is trying to do. And only some parts of culture connect with relevant organizational theories about how organizations could and should work. So Denison wisely chose to measure only those parts of culture that should relate to performance and has shown how the combination of measurement and working with the organization does indeed improve performance.

Developing a measurement tool, even with the right culture variables, is, of course, not nearly enough. Denison and his colleagues show us throughout how measuring culture elements is truly useful in helping organizations improve only if the measurement process itself becomes a useful intervention in the organization's own change process. A change-oriented leader cannot produce change without measurement tools, but a measurement-oriented leader cannot produce change without a strategy that integrates the measurement into the fabric of the change process. This is not easy to do, yet the cases analyzed here show the way.

By looking at the culture analysis over time, we gain both some sense of how valid the measurement tool is and, more important, what it actually takes to create organizational improvement, by showing how the measures focused the change activity. This commitment to measurement over time is an important aspect of what Denison and his team have shown to be essential in a change process. In illustrating how the variables measured change over time, the authors also show us important elements of organizational theory—what does it actually take to make cultural changes that matter? How do the choices of what we measure influence our theoretical thinking about what it takes to produce change?

These cases and the analysis will be of great use to researchers, consultants, and leaders who face the difficult problem of how to get culture change started and how to keep it on track.

Edgar H. Schein
professor emeritus,
MIT Sloan School of Management