Organisational Climate/Culture and Social Network Analysis

Description

What are culture and climate, and why is it essential to assess them?

Organizational Culture is defined as a "set of shared values that guide the employees' interactions with peers, management, and clients" (Quinn & McGrath, 1985).

Culture includes beliefs about the organizational purpose, performance criteria, the location of authority, legitimate bases of power, decision-making orientations, style of leadership, compliance, evaluations, motivation, health, and safety.

Organisational Climate is defined as "the employees' perceptions of their organization's behaviours" (James & Jones, 1974; James & Sells, 1981) and can be understood as a surface manifestation of culture (Schein, 1985; Schneider, 1990).

Climate is known to predict many fundamental organisational outcomes, such as:

• Job satisfaction (employee satisfaction).
• Stress.
• (Individual) Job performance.
• Employee motivation.
• Safety motivation

Assessing the climate allows targeting specific and effective interventions to better all these outcomes.

How will HURACT assess your organisational climate?

We will be inspired by Quinn and Rohrbaugh's concurrent value framework (CVF) as an organisational taxonomy. We will see what dimensions measure organisational climate represent them using charts and dashboards. We will use OLAP tools to analyse and visualise the data.

Example (partial) of the Organizational Climate Dashboard.
The bullet graphs represent some of the dimensions of the organizational climate compared to targets.
All data has been altered and anonymized.

What is Social Network Analysis, and why it is important to assess it?

The Social Network Analysis (SNA) is a methodology for analysing social relations developed from the early contributions of Jacob Levi Moreno, the founder of sociometry, a science that analyses interpersonal relationships.

SNA reveals the following patterns:

• Social cohesion
• Perceived Social Support
• Perceived Management support
• Non-formal organisations
• Non-formal leadership
• Organisational clans
• Degree of connection between geographically distributed organisations.

This approach is precious when assessing organisational cohesion and when members work remotely (smart working / teleworking). We will use this methodology to understand the degree of interconnectedness between the organisation members. We will use dedicated software to analyse and visually represent the climate and the network.

An organisational sociogram on leadership. All data has been altered and anonymized.

Our methodology

Our methodology consists of a nine steps process.

1. Share the predictors/criterion's constructs definition, adopting a sounding theoretical model.
2. Define predictors/criterion's dimensions that the organisation is interested in assessing (semi-structured interviews or questionnaires to Management).
3. Find/acquire psychometrical sounding (e.g. reliable, valid) measures for predictors and criteria.
4. Pilot & refine questionnaires.
5. Administer questionnaires to the selected population.
6. Analyse data and discover insights.
7. Create Dashboard.
8. Presentation of results.
9. Plan interventions.