Discussion: Analyzing Organizational Culture

A company’s culture is often buried so deeply inside rituals, assumptions, attitudes, and values that it becomes transparent to an organization’s members only when, for some reason it changes.

—Rob Goffee

Culture is embedded within every organization. Yet, because culture is woven throughout the everyday interactions and atmosphere of an organization, it can be difficult to assess and explain how the culture influences the inner workings of the organization.

As a nurse leader-manager, developing a sound understanding of an organization’s culture can help you to achieve quality improvement initiatives and identify strategies for enacting sustainable change.

For this Discussion, you analyze the culture of an organization and consider how this relates to achieving goals related to quality improvement. You may wish to focus on the same organization that you have selected for your Course Project.

To prepare:

Review the information on organizational culture in this week’s Learning Resources.

Reflect on the culture of an organization with which you are familiar. Consider the following:

What elements of the organization’s culture seem most prominent or significant to you?

What beliefs, dispositions, and/or actions seem to be most valued? Why do you think so?

What do you notice about the expectations, assumptions, and more demonstrated among people within the organization?

What artifacts provide clues about the culture?

How do these cultural elements contribute to or detract from the organization’s ability to meet prominent goals and objectives?

Consider how you, as a nurse leader-manager, could apply your knowledge of this culture to facilitate quality improvement initiatives within this organization. How would you leverage the strengths of the culture, and address limitations or obstacles that may arise within it?

Post an analysis of the culture of the organization that you selected. Explain how you think this particular culture contributes to or detracts from the organization’s ability to meet goals. Explain how you, as a nurse leader-manager, could utilize your knowledge of this culture to facilitate quality improvement initiatives within this organization.

Read a selection of your colleagues’ responses.

Respond to at least two of your colleagues on two different days using one or more of the following approaches:

Analyze similarities and differences between your colleague’s organizational culture and the organization that you selected.

Ask a probing question, substantiated with additional background information or research.

Share an insight from having read your colleagues’ postings, synthesizing the information to provide new perspectives.

Suggest leadership strategies that your colleague could use to overcome obstacles in the organization’s culture to facilitate quality improvement initiatives.

Required Readings

Hickey, J. V., & Brosnan, C. A. (2017). Evaluation of health care quality in for DNPs (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Springer Publishing Company.

Chapter 10, “Evaluation of Patient Care Standards, Guidelines, and Protocols” (pp. 207-226)

Chapter 12, “Evaluating Populations and Population Health” (pp. 265-280)

Chapter 10 reviews methods for using national, local, and organizational standards to evaluate the quality of health care practices. Chapter 12 examines strategies for identifying quality issues through the evaluation of populations.

Sadeghi, S., Barzi, A., Mikhail, O., & Shabot, M. M. (2013). Integrating quality and strategy in health care organizations, Burlington, MA: Jones & Bartlett Publishers.

Chapter 3, “General Concepts in Quality” (pp. 45–82)

See the six aims for quality proposed by the Institute of Medicine (IOM).

Bellot, J. (2011). Defining and assessing organizational culture. Nursing Forum, 46(1), 29–37.