Description
Despite the substantial impact organizational culture can have on important organizational outcomes, little research has been devoted to the measurement of the misalignment between the culture top management publicly endorses (espoused culture) and the actual culture perpetuated within the organization that guides employee behavior (enacted culture), as well as the outcomes and moderators associated with this misalignment. To a limited extent, aspects of cultural misalignment have been discussed in research related to espoused versus enacted values, declared versus actual culture, and strategy consistency in resource allocation decisions. However, with the exception of declared versus actual culture, these research topics only address the misalignment between specific espoused and enacted elements of culture. In addition, none of these research areas have produced a concise measure of cultural alignment, nor do they specifically focus on employee perceptions of cultural alignment. In this thesis, I tested a new measure of cultural alignment, termed cultural integrity, and tested a series of hypotheses related to its predictors and outcomes. I used survey data, both archival and collected, from two different nursing samples in the Southwestern United States. The archival sample (Study 1) was used to perform a confirmatory factor analysis, which supported a one-factor model of the construct. In addition, regression analyses suggested that cultural integrity is positively related to affective commitment, negatively related to turnover intentions, and positively related to job satisfaction. With the exception of the cultural integrity-affective commitment relationship, the collected sample (Study 2) replicated the significant results from Study 1. Study 2 also tested trait cynicism as a predictor of cultural integrity and examined how the relationships between cultural integrity and outcomes are moderated by participants' level of work centrality using regression analyses. Results did not support the trait cynicism-cultural integrity relationship or the moderation hypotheses. These results extend the research on cultural alignment by providing initial support for a useful tool measuring cultural integrity that can be of use to both researchers and practitioners, and by showing that individuals' overall perceptions of the alignment between espoused and enacted values are related to important individual-level outcomes.
