The Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate

Neal M. Ashkanasy, Celeste P M Wilderom, Mark F. Peterson, Neal M. Ashkanasy, Celeste P. M. Wilderom, Mark F. Peterson

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9781412974820
• eBook ISBN: 9781483305530
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Decision Making
• Index: Business

In The Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate: Second Edition, a team of leading international scholars presents the state-of-the-art in the field, ten years after the publication of the award-winning First Edition. Following the Preface by Edgar Schein, 33 entirely new chapters document the development and maturing of ideas canvassed in the First Edition, and also offer exciting new perspectives on organizational culture and climate.

This Handbook will be a must-have resource for researchers and students in management, human resource management, organizational behavior, industrial and organizational psychology, and social psychology.

Part I

CULTURE, CLIMATE, AND MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS

1. Introduction to The Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate, Second Edition

NEAL M. ASHKANASY, CELESTE P. M. WILDEROM, AND MARK F. PETERSON

2. Organizational Culture: Meaning, Discourse, and Identity

MATS ALVESSON

3. Organizational Climate Research: Achievements and the Road Ahead

BENJAMIN SCHNEIDER, MARK G. EHRHART, AND WILLIAM H. MACEY

4. Multilevel Issues in Organizational Culture and Climate Research

FRANCIS J. YAMMARINO AND FRED DANSEREAU

CHAPTER 1

Introduction to The Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate , Second Edition

NEAL M. ASHKANASY, CELESTE P. M. WILDEROM, AND MARK F. PETERSON

It is now 10 years since the publication of the first edition of the Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate. At that time (2000), we would often hear colleagues ask, “Why are you doing this when organizational culture and climate have now become so passé?” Others would remind us that culture and climate had become niche topics and assured us that a handbook would not be successful. As things unfolded, however, and confounding the critics, the Handbook did turn out to be highly successful, resulting in frequent reprints including the publication of a paperback edition in 2004. Moreover, the Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate was awarded an American Libraries Association Choice Award for outstanding titles and was nominated for the Academy of Management’s Terry Book Award. It has been favorably reviewed in leading journals including Administrative Science Quarterly, Choice, Personnel Psychology, Journal of General Management, Management Revue, Public Performance & Management Review, and Society and Welfare. In addition, it has been widely adopted in doctoral-level teaching programs in the United States and beyond.

Also reflecting the real level of interest in culture and climate at the beginning of the decade, the Handbook was followed in 2001 by the publication of The International Handbook of Organizational Culture and Climate (Cooper, Cartwright, & Earley, 2001). Moreover, there was surprisingly little overlap in the two volumes, with the international handbook focusing on some of the more qualitative topics in the field. Interestingly, Daniel Denison (2003) in a review of both volumes commented, “Although the word ‘international’ appears in the title of the Cooper handbook, and despite the publisher’s claim on the back cover that this is the ‘first truly international book on the subject of culture and climate in organizations,’ the content doesn’t bear this out. Both books are highly international, with Cooper presenting a predominantly Anglo-American collection, while Ashkanasy adds more representation from Israel, Canada, and Australia” (p. 119). In the end, both books were very successful and provided an impetus for research in culture and climate that continues today.

Despite the success of the two handbooks, when we first floated the idea of a second edition of our volume, we were again met with the refrain that culture and climate were old hat, and scholars have moved on to new and different topics, such as organizational identity. The obvious response to this is simply that these are new and potentially exciting developments and, far from suggesting that a second edition would not attract interest, these indicate that there is a waiting market for it. Indeed, we have been receiving a stream of emails inquiring as to when the second edition would be published. Thus, while Denison (2003, p. 125) felt in reviewing the two volumes, “Some of that early fire and conviction (in the culture/climate field) is missing,” he concluded, “perhaps now that the foundation has been clearly articulated, the revolution can begin again!” We are not sure “another revolution” is under way, but we believe strongly that the field is continuing to develop and that there is now scope to publish in this new volume some of the interesting and innovative ideas that are emerging in this field.

Indeed, we believe it is simply absurd for anyone to think that culture and climate are notions that will be even slightly diminished in the foreseeable future. Human beings are, by their nature, social animals, so the sediments within which and processes whereby humans socialize, communicate, and organize are inevitably going to attract ongoing scholarship. As Edgar Schein comments in the preface to this volume, “No one would question today that in some form or another, there are palpable phenomena in groups, organizations and industries that are best described as climate and/or culture.” Thus, although it is now 70 and 40 years respectively since Kurt Lewin, Ronald Lippitt, and Ralph White (1939) and Andrew Pettigrew (1979) introduced us to the notions of organizational climate and culture, the concepts will endure as long as humans seek to organize, irrespective of what particular nomenclature is used. In particular, and as we outlined in our introduction to the first edition (Ashkanasy, Wilderom, & Peterson, 2000), the basic building blocks of culture and climate are still in place, and they are the foundations from which a key field within the wider organizational behavior domain is developing.

This assertion applies to both climate and culture. In terms of defining these constructs, we defined climate specifically at the psychological group level, namely, “Configurations of attitudes and perceptions by organization members that, in combination, reflect a substantial part of the context of which they are a part and within which they work” (Ashkanasy et al., 2000, p. 8). We noted, however, that culture is not so clear-cut, and it cuts across diffuse traditions in disciplines such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Thus, we concluded that culture has to do with “understand (ing) the systems of meanings, values, and actions that characterize whole societies” (Ashkanasy et al., 2000, p. 8). More recently, Neal M. Ashkanasy (2007, p. 1028) noted that, in organizational climate, “the focus is on organizational members’ agreed perceptions of their organizational environment,” while in organizational culture, “the focus is on judgments and values, rather than perceived practices and procedures.” Inevitably in an edited volume on this subject at this point in its lifetime is the fact that authors from different cultures use various (seemingly similar) conceptual definitions of this form of human organizing, all pertaining to fairly enduring multileveled, organized work contexts entailing the following: organizing values, norms, taken-for-granted assumptions, behavioral regularities, rituals, practices, procedures, patterns of discourse, use of symbols, ways identity is constructed, and so on. Certain by now, furthermore, is that organizational culture and climate are highly intangible, complex phenomena in need of integrative or multidisciplinary approaches, and they are harder to come by in the increasingly specialized and more or less homogenized journals in which most of us aspire to publish. In this respect, we agree with Schein’s conclusion in the preface to this volume that scholars need “to view both climate and culture as abstractions that lead (them) to taking a useful perspective toward human behavior in complex systems.”

STRUCTURE OF THE HANDBOOK

The Handbook is structured into six parts, covering a wide diversity of topics. Part I, edited by Neal M. Ashkanasy, comprises of three defining essays that set the tone and themes that follow. Parts II and III, edited by Celeste P. M. Wilderom, deal with social and organizational processes in managing culture and climate. The following part, edited by Ashkanasy, focuses on the nature and processes underlying the dynamic nature of culture and climate change in organizations. The concluding parts of the volume, Parts V and VI, are edited by Mark F. Peterson and refer respectively to topics in organizational theory and international themes. In the following pages, we provide a brief synopsis of each of the sections.

Part I: Culture, Climate, and Multilevel Analysis

The three chapters in Part I, written by the leading contemporary scholars in their respective fields, define the current state of the field.

The Handbook’s substantive content opens in Chapter 2 with an essay by Mats Alvesson, who is arguably today the preeminent contemporary scholar of organizational culture. Alvesson takes an in-depth look at conceptual foundations of organizational culture and discusses its ontological differentiation from culture’s more contemporary cousins: discourse and identity. He notes in particular, “Sometimes one gets the impression that what may appear to be novel theoretical developments may be just a matter of shifting labels.” But Alvesson warns against conflating these terms. In particular, each offers new and different insights into our understanding of organizational phenomena. In this case, Alvesson sees discourse and identity as “textual,” in contrast to culture, which represents “deeper meanings and symbolism.” More importantly, and consistent with the arguments we presented in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, Alvesson notes that culture should be viewed as a “cornerstone in any broad understanding of organization and management.”

Chapter 3 addresses the current state of the art in our understanding of organizational climate. The lead author, Benjamin Schneider, is the acknowledged leader in the field. Together with coauthors Mark G. Ehrhart and William H. Macey, he outlines a definitive summary of what we know in the field and where the field is heading. Schneider (who also authored a commentary and a chapter on service climate for the first edition of the Handbook, see Schneider, 2000; Schneider, Bowen Ehrhart, & Holcombe, 2000) and his colleagues conclude in particular that “research in climate has increased dramatically since 2000” and add that this is especially encouraging because climate as a construct was “once thought to be dead.” On the contrary, as is made abundantly clear in this chapter and throughout the Handbook, research into organizational climate is thriving, most especially in terms of developing a more nuanced understanding of the construct, often involving sophisticated explanatory (mediating) and contextual (moderating) variables.

More importantly, Schneider and his associates identify five areas that will need attention if research in this field is to progress. The gist of these issues is that organizational climate continues to be a rather fragmented construct (e.g., “climate for” this and that) and that, as yet, a unifying theory, one that would more definitively differentiate it from psychological climate and organizational culture, has not emerged. To round out the chapter, the authors provide a series of challenges for scholars of organizational climate, in particular to understand the relationships of climate and organizational strategic imperatives and to develop a clearer picture of the nexus of leadership and climate.

In summary, we see the first two chapters that follow this introduction as supportive of our view that the fields of climate and culture are not moribund. Instead, they are constantly and rapidly evolving, with new ideas and concepts cropping up on a regular basis, opening new avenues for research and scholarship, not to mention the practical implications of these developments.

The final introductory chapter (Chapter 4), by Francis J. Yammarino and Fred Dansereau, introduces readers to an innovative new lens on culture and climate. Since the earliest days of research in these fields, the levels of analysis issue has dogged the field, often leading to confused and even erroneous research (e.g., see Rousseau, 1985). Yammarino and Dansereau, the acknowledged experts in multilevel organizational analysis, provide in this chapter a conceptual model that addresses this issue. They point out in particular that, inherently, “organizational culture and climate… (involve) … theories, models, concepts, constructs, dimensions, aspects, relationships, and processes that encompass multiple levels of analysis.” Although most would respond to this by saying this is already well known, the fact is that no conceptually rigorous model has been published to date that deals with the multilevel nature of climate and culture.

To address this issue, Yammarino and Dansereau identify four levels of analysis relevant to organizational research (individual, group, organization, society). They also differentiate between two perspectives: wholes (focus on relationships between entities) and parts (focus on relationships within entities) and outline two overall approaches: single versus multilevel. They then go on to describe how multilevel analysis may be accomplished in both quantitative and qualitative research. Some of this is rather technical, but the authors have tried as far as possible not to include too much technical detail, instead referring readers to their other writings (e.g., Yammarino, Dionne, Chun, & Dansereau, 2005). Instructively, the authors report an analysis of multilevel structures included in the first edition of the Handbook, demonstrating conclusively how deeply multilevel issues are ingrained in the field.

In summary of Part I, we emphasize how each of the chapters has contributed uniquely to furthering our understanding of organizational culture and climate. All three chapters add to our arguments in this chapter that climate and culture are enduring concepts. The constructs have not been superseded or replaced with others. As Alvesson points out, concepts such as discourse and identity have not replaced culture. Indeed, and as pointed out in other chapters (see Linstead, Chapter 18; Meckler, Chapter 25), these concepts serve to deepen our understanding of culture. Similarly, and as Schneider and his colleagues argue, we are only just beginning to understand the theoretical, research, and practical nature of organizational climate. And finally, we hope that readers pay careful attention to what Yammarino and Dansereau write in Chapter 4. Culture and climate are both inherently multilevel constructs, often involving more than two levels of analysis simultaneously, and future scholarship in the field needs to adopt the rigorous approach outlined in this chapter.

In the following section of the Handbook, we have arranged the chapters into five parts that deal with progressively higher levels of analysis, beginning at the individual level and ending with a cross cultural perspective.

Part II: Toward Positive Work Cultures and Climates

Arguably, one of the defining movements in psychology and organizational scholarship has been positivity (Cameron, Dutton, & Quinn, 2003; http://www.bus.umich.edu/positive). The underlying premise of this movement is that scholars have for too long focused almost exclusively on negative aspects of behavior. Thus, instead of asking, “What is good, and how can we do it better?” scholars have asked, “What’s wrong, and how can we address the problem?” To date, the positive organization scholarship movement has focused on individuals and structures, but little to date has been written about positivity using a climate-culture lens. The six chapters in Part II, which was edited by Wilderom, seek to address this deficiency. The chapters approach this topic from a variety of contemporary view points, including the work environment (Chapter 6: Härtel & Ashkanasy), building ethical strength (Chapter 7: Vacharkulksemsuk, Sekerka, & Fredrickson), fostering positivity in an economic downturn (Chapter 8: Gibbs & Cooper), a positive approach to error management (Chapter 9: Keith & Frese), and enhancing the meaningfulness of work (Chapter 10: Cardador & Rupp).

Positive organizational scholarship is still relatively new, but we expect tha...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• PART I. CULTURE, CLIMATE, AND MULTILEVEL ANALYSIS
• PART II. TOWARD POSITIVE WORK CULTURES AND CLIMATES
• PART III. STATE-OF-THE-ART REVIEWS ON SOCIAL-ORGANIZATIONAL PROCESSES
• PART IV. ORGANIZATIONAL DYNAMICS AND IDENTITY: DEFINING THE NEW PARADIGM
• PART V. ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE AND ORGANIZATION THEORY
• PART VI. INTERNATIONAL THEMES IN ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE RESEARCH
• Index
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors