Culture Assessment: What It Measures, Methods, and How to Read the Results
A culture assessment is a structured study of how work gets done in an organization. It documents the behaviors people repeat, the values leaders state, and the assumptions nobody questions, and it compares that picture with the culture the strategy requires. An organizational culture assessment usually combines a survey, interviews, focus groups, and direct observation. It produces a description of the current culture, the gaps between that culture and the one leaders want, and a short set of priorities for closing those gaps.
What does a culture assessment measure?
Edgar Schein of the MIT Sloan School of Management wrote the definition that most assessments still start from. In "Coming to a New Awareness of Organizational Culture", published in Sloan Management Review in 1984, he defines organizational culture as "the pattern of basic assumptions" that a group develops as it learns to cope with external adaptation and internal integration. The group then teaches those assumptions to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel.
Schein's 1983 MIT working paper, "Organizational Culture: A Dynamic Model", describes three levels of culture, and a sound assessment measures all three.
Artifacts are the visible level: the physical setting, the technology, how people dress and behave, and the documents the organization publishes. Schein notes that artifacts are easy to collect and hard to interpret, because they show what people do without showing why. Values are the reasons people give for their behavior. They are harder to observe, and Schein suggests inferring them from interviews with key members and from documents such as charters. Basic assumptions are the deepest level. Schein describes them as "typically unconscious," and they determine how members perceive, think, and feel.
In practice, the three levels translate into concrete questions. An assessment records how decisions get made and who makes them, how leaders react to bad news, which behaviors earn promotion, how teams cooperate across functions, and how the organization treats mistakes and risk. It records how much these patterns differ between sites, functions, and levels of seniority. It also records the culture people say they want, so that leaders can see the distance between the current state and the preferred state.
Which methods does an organizational culture assessment use?
No single method reaches all three levels. Surveys measure stated values and perceived norms across the whole workforce. Interviews, focus groups, and observation explain the survey numbers and bring assumptions to the surface. The table compares the five methods that assessments draw on most often.
| Method | What it shows | Main limit |
|---|---|---|
| Survey | How widely a norm or value is held, and how groups differ | Reports what people say, and gives no reasons |
| Interviews | The reasoning and history behind behavior, in the person's own words | Small sample, and people filter what they tell an interviewer |
| Focus groups | Which norms a peer group shares and where its members disagree | Dominant voices can steer the room |
| Observation | What people do in meetings, handovers, and daily work | Covers only the settings the assessor attends |
| Document and data review | What the organization rewards, measures, and writes down | Shows formal intent, which can differ from practice |
Surveys
A survey gives every employee the same questions, which makes it the one method that can compare groups with numbers. A useful culture survey asks about observable behavior, such as "my manager asks for dissenting views before a decision," because people can report what they have seen. It protects anonymity by reporting only on groups above a minimum size. It also collects enough demographic detail (function, site, level, tenure) to show where subcultures differ. A survey tells you where a pattern exists, and the qualitative methods tell you why it exists.
Interviews and focus groups
One-on-one interviews with executives, managers, and long-tenured employees reach the reasons behind behavior. Good culture interviews ask for stories: a decision that went badly, a person who earned a promotion, a time someone raised a problem and what happened next. Focus groups put a small group of peers in one room and let them react to each other, which shows the norms the whole group shares and the ones only some members hold. Schein's working paper recommends joint exploration between an outsider and insiders, because the outsider's surprise at a behavior helps insiders name an assumption they stopped noticing long ago.
Observation and document review
Observation checks what people say against what they do. An assessor sits in on leadership meetings, operating reviews, and shift handovers and notes who speaks, who decides, and how the group handles disagreement. Document and data review adds a record that predates the assessment: promotion and exit data, performance criteria, engagement results, policies, and the messages leaders send. When the values stated in those documents differ from the behavior observed in meetings, the difference is itself a finding.
Which published culture assessment instruments are well known?
The Competing Values Framework and the OCAI
The Competing Values Framework began as research on organizational effectiveness. In a 1983 Management Science paper, Robert Quinn and John Rohrbaugh asked organizational researchers to judge how similar a set of effectiveness criteria were. Their analysis pointed to underlying value dimensions that include control versus flexibility and internal versus external focus. Crossing those two dimensions produces four quadrants, and Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn named a culture type for each one: clan, adhocracy, market, and hierarchy.
Cameron and Quinn built the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) on that framework. In Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture, they explain that the OCAI assesses six dimensions of culture and produces an overall culture profile. The instrument profiles the current culture and the culture respondents prefer for the future, so the result is a pair of profiles and the gap between them.
Each type describes a different set of priorities. A clan culture combines an internal focus with flexibility and emphasizes relationships, teamwork, and commitment. An adhocracy culture combines an external focus with flexibility and emphasizes innovation and experimentation. A market culture combines an external focus with stability and control and emphasizes competition and goal achievement. A hierarchy culture combines an internal focus with stability and control and emphasizes efficiency and process. The profile shows a mix of the four types, and the assessment question is whether that mix fits the strategy.
Sector surveys such as the AHRQ SOPS
Some instruments measure one aspect of culture in one industry. The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality runs the Surveys on Patient Safety Culture (SOPS) program, which started in 2001 and covers hospitals, medical offices, nursing homes, community pharmacies, and ambulatory surgery centers. The surveys ask providers and staff how they perceive topics such as communication openness, response to error, teamwork, and staffing, and AHRQ makes them publicly available for download and use. An organization with a specific cultural risk, such as safety, can pair a sector survey with a broader assessment.
Published instrument or custom questions?
A published instrument brings tested questions and a known framework, which makes results easier to explain and to repeat. Custom questions fit the organization's own strategy and vocabulary. The two approaches combine well: a published instrument supplies the overall profile, and a short custom section covers the specific behaviors the strategy depends on.
How do you read culture assessment results?
Start with the gaps. The distance between the current and preferred profiles shows where employees want change. The distance between the current culture and the behaviors the strategy requires shows where the business needs change. The two gaps can point in different directions, and the places where they diverge deserve the most discussion.
Next, split the results by group. An overall average hides the differences between a plant and headquarters, between engineering and sales, and between executives and frontline staff. A wide difference in how executives and frontline staff describe the same culture is one of the most useful findings an assessment can produce, because it shows where the leadership team's picture of the organization is out of date.
Then compare what people said with what the assessor saw. When a survey reports that people feel free to speak up and the observed meetings show three people doing all the talking, trust the observation and ask what the survey question meant to respondents. Treat every score as a hypothesis to test in interviews.
Finally, connect each finding to a business outcome. "Low score on collaboration" is a description. "Product and operations plan separately, and launch dates slip as a result" is a finding a leadership team can act on.
What should you do after a culture assessment?
An assessment that ends with a report changes nothing. Six steps turn the findings into behavior.
- Share the results with the people who provided them. Employees who gave candid answers expect to hear what leaders learned, and silence after a survey teaches them that candor is wasted.
- Choose a small number of behaviors. Pick two or three behaviors that the strategy depends on and that the assessment shows are weak.
- Define the target culture in behavioral terms. Write each priority as something a person can see and do, such as "raise a schedule risk in the weekly review before it becomes a delay."
- Align the systems that reward behavior. Hiring criteria, promotion decisions, performance goals, and meeting routines either reinforce the target behavior or contradict it.
- Start with leaders. People copy what leaders do under pressure, so executives and managers need to practice the new behaviors before they ask others for them.
- Measure again. Repeat the relevant survey items and observations on a fixed schedule so that leaders can see whether behavior has moved.
Culture work then joins the rest of the change agenda. The same findings feed strategy execution, because they show which habits will slow the plan. They also shape the change management approach for any transformation already underway.
When is a culture assessment worth doing?
Four situations justify the effort. The first is a merger or acquisition, where two cultures have to work as one and leaders need facts about both before they combine teams. Cultural integration starts with an assessment of each side. The second is a new strategy that asks people to behave differently, for example by deciding faster or working more closely across functions. The third is a transformation that has stalled even though the technology and process work is on plan. The fourth is a pattern leaders cannot explain, such as rising turnover in one function or repeated failures to escalate problems.
The time an assessment takes depends on the number of employees and sites, the number of interviews and focus groups, the languages involved, how quickly leaders make themselves available, and whether usable survey data already exists. A single-site organization with recent engagement data needs far less fieldwork than a multinational with no baseline.
BD Emerson delivers culture assessments with our Andersen Consulting colleagues at Daniels Consulting Group, a firm of organizational psychologists and experienced business professionals whose culture work covers three stages: assess, define, and activate. If you need an evidence-based picture of your culture and a plan to change it, see our culture transformation consulting service or book a consultation.
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