Organizational culture and positive work environments.

This symposium will examine the role of organizational culture in shaping positive work environments and organizational effectiveness. Cultural underpinning is essential to managers’ ability to motivate individuals and groups towards positive outcomes, and to manage their organization’s social environment effectively. The aim of the session is to consider the status of theory and research in the organizational culture area and to discuss emerging directions for future research on key topics of organizational effectiveness and well-being. In line with this aim, the symposium includes one theoretical contribution presenting new issues and three papers outlining the findings of recent studies for future cultural research efforts to explore. The first paper reviews the findings relating to culture, with a main focus on the role of affective and emotional processes, and discusses three central cultural enablers of a ‘Positive Work Environment’: values in action; the shared norms leaders endeavor to enact among their employees, and employees’ organizational knowledge structures. The second paper outlines the findings of a multilevel study on how cultural dimensions affect employees’ perceptions of their context, their group and organizational collective efficacy, and both employee and organization oriented organizational effectiveness. In the third paper, the role of middle management commitment to change is investigated, with results from a eight years study suggesting that organizational culture and climate underpin organizational commitment during organizational change. The final paper addresses the relevance of catching organizational culture complexity for effective managerial action and intervention, by presenting findings on psychometric properties of a new combined typing and profiling measure of organizational culture, the Intensity & Strength Organizational Culture Questionnaire. Overall, this symposium will relay the role of cultural dimensions in affecting employees’ effectiveness, well-being and commitment to their organization, and will call for research to examine how organization-level factors enable actions of organizational members, at the individual and group levels of analyses, resulting in effective and positive work settings.