Before providing an overview of our integrated model shown in Figure 22.1, it is important to define the constructs of culture and climate. Climate is an experientially based description of what people see and report happening to them in an organizational situation (L. R. James & Jones, 1974; L. R. James, Joyce, & Slocum, 1988; Schneider, 2000). Climate involves employees' perceptions of what the organization is like in terms of practices, policies, procedures, routines, and rewards (e.g., A. P. Jones & James, 1979; Rentsch, 1990; Schneider, 1990). Hence, climate's focus is on the situation and its link to the perceptions, feelings, and behavior of employees. It can be viewed as temporal, subjective, and possibly subject to manipulation by authority figures (Dennison, 1996).
Whereas climate is about experiential descriptions or perceptions of what happens, culture helps define why these things happen (Schein, 2000; Schneider, 2000). It pertains to employees' fundamental ideologies (Trice & Beyer, 1993) and assumptions (Schein, 1992) and is influenced by symbolic interpretations of organizational events and artifacts (Hatch, 1993). Culture represents an evolved context embedded in systems (Dennison, 1996; Schein, 2000), is more stable than climate, has strong roots in history (Rowlinson & Procter, 1999), is collectively held, and is resistant to manipulation (Dennison, 1996).
Thus, climate is more immediate than culture. Individuals can sense the climate upon entering an organization through things such as the physical appearance of the place, the emotionality and attitudes exhibited by employees, and the experiences and treatment of visitors and new employee members. In contrast, culture is a deeper phenomenon based on symbolic meanings (Hatch, 1993) that reflect core values and underlying ideologies and assumptions (Schein, 1992; Trice & Beyer, 1993). This interpretative process explains the why of organizational behavior. Climate develops from the deeper core of culture. Climate, or the what of the culture, can result from espoused values and shared tacit assumptions and reflects the surface organizational experience based on policies, practices, and procedures (Guion, 1973; Schein, 2000).
Figure 22.1 represents a heuristic model for locating culture and climate in a conceptual framework across aggregate and individual levels of analysis and is used to help structure our review. Figure 22.1 shows that organizational culture is a function of industry and environmental characteristics, national culture, and an organization's vision, goals, and strategy (Aycan, Kanungo, & Sinha, 1999). The relationship between societal or national culture and organizational culture, however, may be more complex than depicted in our multilevel model. National culture and organizational culture are likely to influence organizational practices interactively (Kopelman, Brief, & Guzzo, 1990), but research is needed to examine the veracity of this notion.
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Returning to Figure 22.1, organizational culture is expected to effect structure, practices, policies, and routines in the organization that in turn provide the context for climate
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perceptions. These organizational practices are the means through which employee perceptions, and subsequent attitudes, responses, and behaviors, are shaped. At the organizational level, cultural values and assumptions lead managers to the explicit or implicit adoption of structural features and practices that influence the climate that develops. Collective attitudes and behaviors of employees are shaped by climate and in turn effect organizational outcomes (e.g., financial performance, customer service, efficiency, productivity). Culture, as a shared meaning across employees, develops through individuals' sense-making process.
Figure 22.1 shows that individuals' background characteristics and process of joining the organization are related to individuals' values and social cognitive processes, which in turn influence psychological climate. When these climate perceptions are shared across an organization's employees, orga-. nizational climate is said to emerge. We also propose that these P shared perceptions will develop only when strong emergent processes are enacted in the organization (practices delivered in such a way as to create a strong situation, homogeneity of attributes among employees, social interaction processes, and leadership). When the emergent process is weak, idiosyncratic perceptions within an organization develop, which produces wide variability in perceptions of climate and can result in wide variability in individual attitudes and behaviors, diminishing the relationship to organizational performance. We also note that there are reciprocal relationships between the variables across the aggregate and individual level. Individual-level constructs are influenced in part by the existing organizational-level constructs (e.g., individual climate perceptions are influenced by the existing organizational climate; individual attitudes and behaviors are influenced in part by the collective attitudes and behaviors). At the same time, individual constructs have a role in creating the contextual variables. Finally, we include feedback loops at both the organizational and individual levels. It is important to note that the model is not comprehensive and we did not include all possible linkages and variables in Figure 22.1. Rather, our purpose was to highlight those relationships that are most critical for integrating culture and climate across levels of analysis; boxes in boldface represent the constructs and linkages that are our primary focus.
ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE
This section begins by providing a brief historical review of the construct of organizational culture. We then consider the levels of organizational culture, the content or types of organizational cultures, and the antecedents and outcomes of organizational culture.
Organizational Culture 567
