Abstract
At the time of this writing, the business concept most vigorously championed by management consultants is the construct of organizational culture. Despite the tremendous attention focused on organizational culture, the concept lacks theoretical consensus among its proponents. Like the concepts of employee engagement and employee well-being, this field cries out for clearly stated definitions that embed the concept within a theoretical framework, allowing theory and measurement to productively develop. This paper argues for a more grounded approach to the concept of organizational culture, setting it within the psychological literature on human motivation. We review the leading definitions of organizational culture in the literature and find that they are reducible to a core set of human motives, each backed by full research traditions of their own, which populate a comprehensive model of twelve human motivations. We propose that there is substantial value in adopting a comprehensive motivational taxonomy over current approaches, which have the effect of “snowballing” ever more dimensions and elements. We consider the impact of setting the concepts of organizational culture within existing motivational constructs for each of the following: (a) theory, especially the development of culture frameworks and, particularly, how the concept of culture relates to the concepts of employee engagement and employee well-being; (b) methods, including the value of applying a comprehensive, structural approach; and (c) practice, where we emphasize the practical advantages of clear operational definitions.
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All data and materials are available upon request from the author except for the University of Tennessee’s Organizational Social Context materials, which must be obtained directly from them. All data generated or analyzed during this study are included in this published article (and its supplementary information files). Original source materials are available from the author by request.
Notes
These include, but are not limited to, ethical issues related to the COVID-19 pandemic, cheating of customers, financial misconduct, police brutality toward civilians, sexual harassment (e.g., in the military and entertainment industry), racism, and deteriorating employee mental health.
Considered more broadly, we would argue that instead of these goals existing as alternative goals to well-being, they represent the essential components of well-being (Pincus, 2023c), an argument that we will detail later in this paper.
Cultural psychologists have emphasized that cultural values are co-created through a continuous interplay or negotiation process, not “given” or “received”.
Aristotle held that there are three states of existence: potentiality, potentiality-as-such (action that moves potential toward actuality), and actuality (the product), for which he used the example of building a house. The materials could be used to build a house, or something else; this is their state of potentiality, what he called “the buildable”. The action of building transforms the materials toward the goal of actualization; this is potentiality-as-such. When the product is finished, the materials are in a state of actuality.
Individuals can be motivated by both positive aspirations or avoidance of negatives frustration of the same motivation, by either, or neither. Because these forces work together in a complementary manner, we have not made different predictions about the operations of positive and negative strivings.
The Glisson team at The University of Tennessee generously provided their proprietary Organizational Social Context (OSC) assessment. To preserve confidentiality, we have not reproduced any of the specific (OSC) items but have instead summarized the distribution of content by the cells of our matrix (Table 4).
Cultural supports or barriers are co-created through the continuous interplay of social actors and institutional systems in any social system. The co-constructivist perspective has been convincingly argued within Cultural Psychology by Jann Valsiner, Svend Brinkmann, Angelo Branco, Elena Paolicchi, Michael Cole, Richard Shweder, Patricia Greenfield, and Joseph Henrich, among others. Despite the mainstream psychological position that values (as expressed in organizational culture) must be enduring, we believe that values are highly susceptible to social influence and are as changeable and dynamic as the needs they reflect.
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Pincus, J.D. Organizational Culture as a Need-Fulfillment System: Implications for Theory, Methods, and Practice. Hu Arenas (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-024-00398-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42087-024-00398-2