Balancing Scientific Approaches and Subjective Insights in Measuring Organisational Culture

Introduction

The organisational culture has been an established concept as the system of common values, assumptions as well as behavioural rules upon which work is practised in organisations (Schein, 1992). Although its impact on the performance, strategy implementation, and employee experience has been broadly recognized, the issue of the most effective way of measuring culture is controversial. The efforts to treat culture as a mere measurable phenomenon provoke significant methodological issues especially between the clearly scientific, metrics-focused views and the more interpretive, depth-oriented ones. This paper critically analyzes these conflicting methods, reviews their weaknesses, and shows using the evidence across sectors that a more balanced and mixed method approach is the only way to have a rigorous cultural diagnosis.  

The Scientific Approach: The Etic, Metrics-Driven Perspective

Quantitative designs take an etic approach, but in which culture is perceived as outside, by converting it into quantifiable dimensions. The systematic comparisons of teams, organisations and sectors can be conducted using standardised diagnostic instruments designed to allow comparisons of organisations, sectors and teams, e.g., the Competing Values Framework (CVF) (Cameron and Quinn 2011) and the Organisational Culture Profile (OCP) (O’Reilly, Chatman and Caldwell, 1991). These tools produce numerical values that allow testing of statistics, benchmarking and tracking the cultural changes over time.  

Strengths of the Quantitative Approach

1. Scalability and efficiency - large-scale surveys can be used to collect data quickly on large population of employees.  
2. Reliability and standardisation - the consistent use of tested instruments has improved psychometric strength.  
3. Patterns and problem areas can therefore be easily spotted using numerical contrasts, making them easily readable; a feature of diagnostic clarity.  
4. Correlation with outcomes - The quantitative measures can be correlated with such key performance indicators as innovation, turnover, safety performance, or financial performance.  

Limitations: The Risk of Reducing Culture to Climate

These advantages notwithstanding, critics hold that most of the instruments measure organisational climate and not culture. Climate implies the attitudes to the existing practices, culture involves more profound, even subconscious assumptions (Schneider and Reichers, 1983). This point of difference is problematic as:  

• Surveys have a hard time revealing tacit assumptions.  

• The respondents can give answers that are distorted because of fear, impression management or the organisational politics.  

• Instruments run the risk of simplification of culture by reducing it into preset categories.  

Indicatively, the four-quadrant model of the CVF such as clan, adhocracy, market and hierarchy has been criticized as the result of creating snapshots of cultures which are complex and dynamic (Cameron and Quinn, 2011). Similarly, it has been criticized that OCP is highly Westernized and market-focused and its applicability to non-Western settings may be restricted (Sarros et al., 2005; Haque et al., 2020).  

The Interpretive Approach: The Emic, Depth-Driven Perspective

Qualitative approaches assume an emic approach and seek to explain culture as perceived by the members of the organisation. Ethnography, observation, interviews, storytelling, and document analysis can help a researcher to interpret rituals, symbols, narratives, and behaviours that cannot be studied using surveys (Ishtiaq, 2019). These are the best ways of determining:  

• Informal rules.  
• Emotional undercurrents.  
• Power dynamics.  
• Deeply held assumptions. 
• Cultural contradictions.  

Van Maanen (1991) and Kunda (2006) have demonstrated that interpretive methods can help to uncover how employees make meaning out of their work, how identity is created by working, and how practice is directed by cultural expectations.  

Nevertheless, the qualitative analysis is usually:  

• Time‑intensive.  
• Less generalisable.  
• Relies on the interpretation of a researcher.  
• Hardly inter-organizational comparable.  

Such restrictions imply that depth may be attained, but breadth may be lost.  

Bridging the Divide: Emerging Hybrid Methods

Newer approaches are aimed at combining the rigour of science with the depth of interpretation. One of the recent changes is Unobtrusive Indicators of Culture (UICs), where naturally occurring data, including communication patterns, collaboration metrics, and digital footprint behaviours, undergo analysis and thus less biased compared to self-report surveys (Stenmark et al., 2022). 

The behavioural evidence that UICs offer is consistent with the first level of culture that is visible artefacts described by Schein. However, these indicators still need interpretation in order to relate them to underlying presumptions about culture, which supports the principle of qualitative follow-up.  

Cross Sector Evidence Demonstrating the Breadth of Culture Measurement

There is a significant amount of empirical evidence, which proves that frameworks of culture assessment cannot be limited to one sector. Their use on the healthcare, banking, education, retail, manufacturing, and aviation industries testifies to the conceptual soundness and flexibility.  

Key Cross-Sector Applications

Sector	Evidence of Culture Measurement	Framework/Method
Healthcare	Ryu et al. (2021) used CVF to analyse hospital culture and its effect on safety and performance.	CVF
Education	Hendricks and Finlayson (2019) applied CVF to South African public schools.	CVF
Banking	Haque et al. (2020) used CVF to diagnose cultural patterns in commercial banks.	CVF
Manufacturing	Meyer et al. (2024) connected CVF cultural types to Industry 4.0 readiness.	CVF
Technology	Sarros et al. (2005) applied OCP to technology firms in Australia.	OCP
Retail	Chatman and O’Reilly (2016) explored culture–performance linkages using OCP in U.S. retail.	OCP
Aviation	Van Maanen (1991) used ethnography to study airport security units.	Qualitative
Engineering	Kunda (2006) examined identity and control in engineering teams.	Qualitative
Cross-Industry	Bakarov et al. (2022) used NLP to analyse cultural patterns across thousands of firms.	UIC/AI

Conclusion

The organisational culture requires a combination of scientificity and the interpretive sensitivity. Quantitative measures provide comparability, scale and diagnostic accuracy but run the risk of capturing climate as opposed to the more fundamental cultural truth. Qualitative methods reveal meaning systems that constitute behaviour but are incapable of generalisation and time. The cross-sector evidence shows that neither of the approaches can be considered adequate and only together they capture two different aspects of what is an intrinsically complex phenomenon. 

A moderated, mixed-method approach (using measures, behavioural data, and interpretive richness) offers the best basis of cultural insight and organisational transformation. Culture cannot be quantified or merely comprehended by observation and only by combining the two approaches do organisations gain the rigorous understanding necessary to act with sound effect.

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