Building Commitment through Organizational Culture

A bunch of individuals does not an organization make. Business leaders increasingly grasp what organization development specialists have long understood: Groups are the building blocks of organizations. This being the case, organizations are most likely to change for the better if they target improvement efforts at groups of employees. Widespread efforts at team building are one example of this trend.

In their efforts to promote organization-wide improvements, organization development practitioners try to understand the dynamic between the organization itself and the groups that it comprises. One group dimension of an organization is its culture. Organizational culture recently has garnered much attention from both researchers and corporate managers.

Definitions of organizational culture vary, but they tend to contain certain commnon themes. For example: * Culture represents the values, beliefs, and expectations shared by its members. * Culture exerts pressure on its members to conform to shared codes. * Culture shapes people's behaviors.

From an organization development standpoint, the concept of organizational culture suggests an avenue for fostering changes in behavior and attitudes in order to bring about desired results. But to do this successfully, OD experts must find out if they can predict certain behaviors and attitudes based on patterns of organizational culture.

For example, research has shown that employees' commitment to an organization affects how well the organization performs in various ways. If it turns out that employee commitment varies in certain predictable ways from one cultural pattern to another, OD specialists could try to strengthen employee commitment--and therefore, organizational effectiveness--by changing the organizational culture.

The concept of commitment

Researchers generally define organizational commitment as the psychological strength of an individual's attachment to the organization. Researchers differ on the basis of the attachment.

Recently, John P. Meyer and Natalie J. Allen developed a comprehensive, integrated model of organizational commitment. According to this model, organizational commitment is a mixture of three components--affective, …