Abstract:
Interest in organizational culture has grown enormously over the last twenty years and much
effort has gone into investigating the relationship between organizational culture and
performance. Because most research to date has focused on large organizations, we chose to
investigate the culture in a community bank undergoing a cultural transformation. We introduce
the idea of 'cultural cohesion,' a concept related to 'strength,' but different in its focus on
identifying specific cultural characteristics on which there is high or low cohesion. We also
introduce a methodology for evaluating cultural value divergence. Through a survey instrument,
we collected demographic information, employees' cultural values, perceptions of their mangers'
values and self-assessments of individual performance. No support was found for using cohesion
as a predictor of individual performance, but many discoveries were made in terms of cultural
values and cultural divergence. The organization most valued Integrity, Willingness and
Teamwork. Employees are surprisingly accurate at perceiving what their managers value, but this
does not mean they necessarily internalize those values. Supervisors tend to value Empowerment,
but subordinates prefer Teamwork. Employees who came from other community banks had the
lowest cultural divergence (highest level of cohesion). These findings have not been tested for
statistical significance.
