A psychometric network approach to organizational culture: opening the can of worms

Practitioners and scholars have been drawn to the concept of organizational culture in their attempts to explain or change organizational phenomena. Whereas, culture has traditionally been conceptualized as a limited set of culture dimensions (e.g., clan, market, hierarchy, and adhocracy), it can be argued that this approach limits our understanding of how various culture building blocks (e.g., values, behaviors, and norms) interconnect, so that this complex interplay has been described as a “can of worms”. To address this gap, this paper introduces culture networks as a viable tool to examine organizational culture. Culture networks move beyond abstract culture dimensions to examine concrete, lower-level culture elements and their interactions. First, psychometric network theory is introduced to reconceptualize culture in terms of a pattern of interconnected culture elements. Next, three empirical demonstrations based on data from two organizations ( N 1 = 4,270 and N 2 = 338) are presented to illustrate the core characteristics of culture networks, namely (a) how they are built, (b) how they uncover cultural drivers (using centrality), and (c) why they may help to predict cultural inertia (using connectivity). Implications and directions for future research are discussed.