The relationship between organisational culture, organisational climate and managerial values

This paper begins with a comprehensive review of the management literature on culture, and demonstrates close parallels with research and writings on organisational climate and values. The paper then reports the findings from an empirical investigation into the relationship between the organisational culture, climate, and managerial values of a large Australian public sector agency. The relative strengths of four dimensions of culture in this organisation were measured using Hofstede's instrument. Added to this were items from a questionnaire developed by Ryder and Southey, derived from the Jones and James instrument measuring psychological climate and providing scores across six specific dimensions of organisational climate. Measures of managerial values, drawn from a questionnaire by Flowers and Hughes, were also incorporated. Results show that levels of culture within this particular organisation are at variance with those reported by Hofstede from his Australian data. Findings indicate a strong link between specific organisational climate items and a number of managerial values dimensions. Additional relationships between particular dimensions of culture, climate and managerial values are also reported. From this, a hypothesised, predictive model of linkages between the constructs is presented. Introduction Organisational culture Blau and Scott were two of the first post-war management authors to assert that all organisations consist of both formal and informal dimensions, and that it is simply not possible to know or understand the workings of an organisation without a sound understanding of its informal character (Blau and Scott, 1962). It was not until 1978, however, that the first major analysis of the informal dimension, focussing on organisational culture and management, gained attention in the mainstream literature of organisational theory (Peters, 1978). This was closely followed by the substantial work of Pettigrew (1979), who suggested that organisational cultures consist of cognitive systems explaining The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available at http://www.emerald-library.com