Background The Competing Values Framework (CVF) has been widely used in

Background The Competing Values Framework (CVF) has been widely used in health services research to assess organizational culture as a predictor of quality improvement implementation, employee and patient satisfaction, and team functioning, among other outcomes. correlations across subscales than within, indicating poor divergent properties. Exploratory factor analysis revealed two factors, comprising the ten items from the entrepreneurial, team, and rational subscales loading on the first factor, and two items from the hierarchical subscale loading on the second factor, along with one item buy 857876-30-3 from the rational subscale that cross-loaded on both factors. Results from confirmatory factor analysis suggested that the two-subscale solution provides a more parsimonious fit to the data as compared to the original four-subscale model. Conclusion This study suggests that there may be problems applying conventional CVF subscales to non-supervisors, and underscores the importance of assessing psychometric properties of instruments in each new context and population to which they are applied. It also further buy 857876-30-3 highlights the challenges management scholars face in assessing organizational culture in a reliable and comparable way. More research is needed to determine if the emergent two-subscale solution is a valid or meaningful alternative and whether these findings generalize beyond VHA. Background Organizational culture comprises the fundamental values, assumptions, and beliefs Rabbit Polyclonal to Prostate-specific Antigen held in common by members of an organization [1]. It is stable, socially constructed, and subconscious. Employees impart the organizational culture to new members, and culture influences in large measure how employees relate to one another and their work environment. Theorists propose that organizational culture is among the most critical barriers to leveraging new knowledge and implementing technical innovation [1]. Health services researchers have frequently used Quinn and Rohrbaugh’s [2] Competing Values Framework (CVF) to assess organizational culture and its association with important indicators of healthcare processes and outcomes [3-11]. As a result, scholars have credited (or faulted) organizational culture with contributing to significant differences among healthcare facilities in organizational performance [3], quality improvement implementation [10], patient-care quality and efficiency [12], effectiveness of provider teams [4,5], healthcare provider job satisfaction [4,5], and patient satisfaction [7]. Although instruments based on the CVF are the most frequently used in healthcare research to assess organizational culture [13], there has been limited validation of CVF instruments [1,14]. The only published study conducted in a healthcare setting for the express purpose of CVF model validation was restricted to hospital managers from a single geographic locale buy 857876-30-3 [15]. It is not clear whether the same CVF model is viable when applied to non-managers, although they typically constitute the largest portion of an organization’s members. Therefore, it is important to understand if an organizational culture instrument is reliable and valid when applied to this group. The objective of the present study is to test psychometric properties of a CVF instrument administered to a large sample of non-supervisory employees in a large healthcare delivery organization. We chose to focus on employees without supervisory responsibility because this instrument in particular and CVF instruments in general, have not been previously validated among non-managers in health care organizations. The Competing Values Framework In the early 1980s, organizational researchers developed the CVF as a conceptual framework to integrate criteria of organizational “effectiveness” [16]. The framework is a synthesis of organizational theories, and posits that most organizations can be characterized along two dimensions, each representing alternative approaches to basic challenges that all organizations must resolve in order to function [17]. The first set of competing values is the degree to which an organization emphasizes centralization and control over organizational processes versus decentralization and flexibility. The second set of competing values is the degree to which the organization is oriented toward its own internal environment and processes versus the external.