Measuring Organic and Mechanistic Cultures

Knowledge workers in today's high-technology organizations require environments with organic characteristics. To retain highly skilled knowledge workers, managers need to determine whether their organizations exhibit organic or mechanistic cultures. Culture is an important factor in successful technology implementation, innovation, mergers, acquisitions, job satisfaction, organizational success, and team effectiveness. This article discusses organic and mechanistic organizational cultures and the organizational culture assessment (OCA) tool. The tool gives an organization's culture type and a numerical score for each of five culture elements. Survey results indicate that the OCA adequately measures organizational culture.