Understanding the culture and climate underpinnings of organizational effectiveness.

It is widely recognized that organizational culture and climate play a central role in strategic choices made by the management that can result in competitive advantage (e.g., see Barney, 1986; Lim, 1995; Schein, 2004). It is therefore important to understand the dynamics of multilevel and cross-cultural factors that contribute to the emergence of strong culture and climate. While a good deal of attention has been paid to the role of leadership and managerial practices, researchers are increasingly developing more expanded and context related models of organizational effectiveness that create a unique gestalt for employees that specific organizational strategies are valued (e. g., see Kish-Gephart, Harrison, & Trevino, 2010; Schneider, White, & Paul,1998). The objective of this symposium is to examine theoretical and empirical advances aimed at understanding the importance of dynamic internal (i.e., culture, climate, structure, strategic leadership, work practices) and external (i.e., regional characteristics; cross-cultural differences; market business) organizational factors, and their linkages in shaping organizational effectiveness. In the first presentation, Mark G. Ehrhart, Benjamin Schneider, and William S. Macey propose an advanced concept of strategic organizational climate that may offer organizations a useful perspective for the creation of competitive advantage. Drawing on Barney’s (1991) resource-based conception of competitive advantage, the authors demonstrate how strategic climate emerges via a host of practices that are bundled together in a coordinated mutually reinforcing ways. Ehrhart and his coauthors maintain that, in order to have strategic climate resulting in competitive advantage, the key attributes are: (a) value (i.e., strategic climates have strong relationships with their respective strategic outcomes, such as customer satisfaction, safety outcomes); (b) rarity (i.e., built through the particular balance of resources and the combination of multiple actions (multiple policies, practices, and procedures) that create a gestalt for employees that a particular strategy is valued by and a priority for management); (c) and inimitability (i.e., resulting from multiple factors that are difficult to mimic by competitors. Amy Y. Ou, Chad A. Hartnell, Angelo Kinicki, and Elizabeth Karam will present next, continuing the theme of organizational effectiveness. These authors propose an expanded model of the antecedents and outcomes of organizational culture designed to address tha lack of “linkage” research among multiple factors (Kish-Gephart, Harrison, & Trevino, 2010). Drawing upon literature on the relationship between culture and organizational performance (Lim, 1995; Siehl & Martin, 1990; Wilderom, Glunk, & Maslowski, 2000), the authors conducted a meta-analytic and holistic examination of a conceptual framework in which (1) senior leaders’ transformational leadership leads to both clan and market cultures, and (2) high-performance work practices mediate the relationship between organizational culture and organizational performance. The third presentation, by Daniel Denison and Katnerine Xin, enlarges the multilevel perspective on organizational effectiveness by shifting the investigation to a cross-national level; focusing on the relationship between culture and organizational successful outcomes in global markets. Their contribution highlights several new perspectives for application of theories of culture to Western (American, European) and Eastern (Chinese) organizations. Denison and Xin contrast the similarities and differences between these three sets of firms, and find that Eastern firms are far more influenced by their founders and their founding conditions, regional characteristics, the dynamics of their industry, and the strategic choices that they have made, hence contributing to understanding the unique cultural factors that are associated with their growing business influence. In the final presentation, Laura Petitta, Claudio Barbaranelli, and Tahira Probst address the relevance of capturing organizational culture complexity for effective managerial action and intervention. They present findings of a cross-cultural validation of a new combined typing and profiling measure of organizational culture, the Intensity & Strength Organizational Culture Questionnaire. This measure was developed in line with (a) Schein’s (1985) organizational culture theory; (b) Enriquez’s (1970) typology of organizational cultures; (c) Payne’s (2000) multidimensional model of cultural intensity and strength. Results support the validity and reliability of the ISOCQ, as well as the hypothesized invariance of the factorial structure across the Italian and United States samples. Furthermore, the different levels of intensity allow researchers and practitioners to determine the consistency between members’ actual behaviours and espoused values. Finally, because the ISOCQ appears to function equivalently across the two cultures, this allows for future investigations of relational equivalence in different national contexts and strengthens the generalizability of extant research findings. The symposium will conclude with a discussion led by Neal M. Ashkanasy from the University of Queensland, Australia. Dr. Ashkanasy is a renowned organizational culture and climate scholar and a co-editor of the first and second editions of Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate.