Attitudes, Values and Organizational Culture: Disentangling the Concepts

Sentiments collected through paper-and-pencil surveys are often arbitrarily classified according to categories imposed by the researcher, such as attitudes, values, and manifestations of organizational culture. The question is, to what extent are such classifications supported by the distinctions that respondents make in their own minds? In this paper, distinctions between categories of sentiments are supported empirically from the results of an employee survey in a large Danish insurance company (n = 2,590). The 120 questions used were classified into attitudes, values, perceptions of organizational practices (for diagnosing organizational cultures), and demographics. Perceptions of organizational cultures were measured using an approach developed by the author and his colleagues in an earlier study across 20 Danish and Dutch organizational units. In the insurance company study, employee attitudes were found to be clearly distinct from employee values. Perceptions of organizational practices were unrelated to values, and only overlapped with attitudes where both dealt with communication. In the latter case, both can be seen as expressions of the organization's communication climate. Other perceptions of organizational practices did not form recognizable clusters at the level of individuals, but only at the level of organizational (sub)units.