A fuzzy approach to value and culture assessment and an application

This paper presents a fuzzy approach to the identification of organizational values and culture. The proposed approach has been developed from crisp assessment methods in the literature and has been applied to the Industrial Engineering Department (IED) at a state university in Turkey. Highly subjective judgments and ambiguity regarding the presence of values and the culture type of the organization resulting from these values suggest the necessity of using a fuzzy approach. Where the uncertainty arises from the inability to perform adequate measurements, fuzzy sets provide a mathematical method of representing such uncertainties. Applying the fuzzy approach, organizational values which are common, and should be common in the IED, are identified and these values are organized into four generic culture types – adhocracy culture, market culture, clan culture and hierarchy culture – stating in which culture type the IED belongs. Finally the uncertainties of the culture sets are quantified by the measure of fuzzy entropy. 2006 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.