Linking organizational culture and customer satisfaction: Results from two companies in different industries

Abstract This article presents a test of the relationship between organizational culture and customer satisfaction using business-unit data from two different companies. The first study examines 32 regional markets of a residential home-building company and the second study examines 148 automobile dealerships. The Denison Organizational Culture Survey (DOCS) is used to measure organizational culture, while customer satisfaction data were collected from customers themselves by independent third parties. With a few exceptions, the culture measures related significantly to customer satisfaction, explaining 28% of the variance for the home-building markets and 11 – 28% of the variance for the auto dealerships. Acknowledgments We would like to thank the organizations that participated in this research and IMD—the International Institute for Management Development in Lausanne, Switzerland—for the support they provided for this research. An earlier version of this manuscript was presented at the 17th annual conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Toronto, ON, 2002.