America's Benefit Specialist July 2023

ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE IS A SUSTAINABLE COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

By Gordon B. Zellers, Ed.D. InCite Performance Group Fort Collins, Colorado gordon@incitepg.com

One of the limiting factors to reaching an organization’s full potential is that organizational culture is frequently mis understood and not properly defined. This topic interested me so much that it was the focus of my doctoral Capstone project at Vanderbilt University. One thing we know from 30+ years of research in this area is that optimal organiza tional culture has real benefits, which I will summarize in this article. ORGANIZATIONS THAT HAVE GREAT CULTURES ALSO HAVE BETTER FINANCIAL PERFORMANCE, RETENTION AND INNOVATION.

The purpose is to offer several key points for executives to understand. These points are based on an abundance of stringent academic research. We know that when organiza tions focus on optimizing their culture, there are significant benefits; thus, I encourage leaders to allocate the appropri ate time and resources to develop and maintain organiza tional culture. First , I want to define what organizational culture means. Organizational culture reflects the behaviors and belief sys tems that occur inside organizations. I will mention six content dimensions that serve as the basis for organizational culture. This is based on a framework that is well accepted in the literature and by many business es called the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), developed by Cameron and Quinn in 2011. From their extensive work studying many organizations, they defined organizational culture in six dimensions: 1. the dominant characteristics of the organization, or what the overall organization is like

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