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The organizational culture–performance link is fundamental to organization development and building a high-performance culture is a responsibility of leaders. The claim of a culture–performance link is most visible in the 1980s (e.g. In Search of Excellence) but is replaced by skepticism by the 1990s. Using conclusion validity as the framework, the purpose of this paper is to synthesize cross-disciplinary literature in organization studies and the emerging sub-field of organizational economics to lay a foundation to establish the link rigorously.

The drivers of conclusion validity – internal validity, external validity and construct validity – guided the literature search and review. The author began with the concepts of organizational culture and performance, examined the organizational economic literature for the causal culture–performance link (internal validity), reviewed the organization studies literature on the debates in the measurement of organizational culture (external and construct validity) and examined the debate if organizational culture can be managed (internal validity).

Organizational economics (which conceptualizes organizational culture as shared beliefs) shows that cultures that are more homogeneous, encourage teamwork and have a clear mission, enhance organizational performance. In measuring culture, survey instruments using the process-oriented approach can rely on these results to strengthen their construct validity. In the search for the organizational culture–performance link, non-cultural factors affecting performance have to be included as control variables.

The weaknesses of early research on the organizational culture–performance link become clear when examined with the conclusion validity framework. This clearness shows the way toward a rigorous empirical analysis.

This review provides guidance for researchers to evaluate published studies on the organizational culture–performance link. It also helps researchers to design new studies with stronger conclusion validity.

This paper aims to report new research into how small groups of people – officers, directors and managers – are guiding the governance, design and delivery of conduct and culture programmes at UK listed banks.

The research spanned two whole years between 2014 and 2015. The method involved some 30 face-to-face semi-structured meeting interviews. A pre-agreed template was used to score and write detailed notes. From many repetitions, themes and cross-interview commonalities, a rich set of findings evolved.

Banks that made the most improvement during the investigation activated culture predominantly within the business. Centring the culture programme within the business was associated with a focus on the middle and the grassroots level of the organisation. Banks that made least improvement activated culture principally “from the top”. Centring the culture programme at the top was associated with a focus on control, conformance and structure. The finding of relatively greater performance when culture programmes were activated within the business contrasts sharply with recommendations from regulators and conventional wisdom that the establishment of corporate culture is necessarily a top down exercise.

Culture is intangible, and as such often overlooked, and this research contributes to that gap in knowledge through insight and evidence based on direct empirical analysis. This work ranks banks differently than published corporate governance and sustainability ranking from third-party service providers, suggesting a focus on culture performance contributes a different perspective to that based on more available public information for corporate governance.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the culture change management programme in one UK NHS ambulance service, documenting various perverse consequences of the change management and suggest further research implications.

The paper reviews the literature on “culture” and “culture change” and identifies several perverse consequences of a culture change management programme through an in-depth case study analysis, based on interviews with trust staff and policy experts along with non-participant observation. Study was given ethical approval by the local NHS research ethics committee.

Significant negative consequences of the culture change management programme in the ambulance service are systematically documented. The paper argues that any worthwhile study of organisational culture change management must take into account the perverse consequences of such a process and its overall impact on employees.

These findings come from detailed investigation from only one large ambulance trust in the UK. However they have significant implications for the organisational “culture-performance” debate.

The paper draws out several policy and practice implications from this empirical study. Any meaningful evaluation of culture change initiatives should be seen not only in relation to success in achieving planned objectives, but also by keeping in mind negative consequences of culture change programmes.

This paper makes an original contribution in identifying and systematically documenting the disjuncture between stated and unintended consequences of ambulance culture change management programme, which will be of value to academics, practitioners and policy makers including theory building.

Examines organizational culture and organizational performance via a discussion of the models of culture and the empirical research conducted to investigate the causal relationship between them. Despite claims of a causal relationship, the culture‐performance link remains unclear. There is a need to improve on the application of the concepts involved. Methodological issues as well as the influence of moderator variables are suggested for consideration in future research.

Interest in the relationship between organizational culture and performance is not new but it still attracts considerable attention from researchers. In the literature on organizational learning, organizational culture is mainly conceived as an essential condition to facilitate and support learning and consequently as an important feature in achieving organizational performance nowadays. In the scope of this research topic, the purpose of this paper is to analyze the effect of organizational learning culture on two organizational outcomes – profitability and customer satisfaction, and the mediation effect of total quality management (TQM) in these relationships.

The data were collected from 107 firms and the technique used for data analysis was structural equation modeling.

The results reveal a positive direct impact of organizational learning culture on organizational profitability and a positive indirect effect, through TQM, on customer satisfaction.

These findings support to a body of literature that claims the relevance of developing a cultural orientation toward learning in organizations in order to contribute to organizational success. This study also takes into account some methodological features in order to increase the quality of culture-performance research.

O interesse na relação entre cultura organizacional e performance, embora não sendo novo, continua a atrair uma atenção considerável da investigação. Na literatura sobre aprendizagem organizacional, a cultura organizacional é maioritariamente entendida como uma condição essencial para facilitar a aprendizagem nas e das organizações e, consequentemente, como um aspeto importante para garantir um desempenho organizacional positivo. No âmbito desta temática, este estudo analisa o efeito de uma cultura organizacional orientada para a aprendizagem em dois tipos distintos de resultados organizacionais – a rentabilidade e a satisfação do cliente, assim como o papel mediador da gestão pela qualidade total nestas relações.

Os dados foram recolhidos numa amostra de 107 empresas e utilizaram-se modelos de equações estruturais para a sua análise.

Os resultados revelam um efeito positivo direto da cultura de aprendizagem na rentabilidade e um efeito positivo indireto, via gestão pela qualidade total, na satisfação dos clientes.

Estes resultados são consonantes com a literatura que defende a relevância de desenvolver uma orientação cultural para a aprendizagem nas organizações, de forma a contribuir para o sucesso organizacional. Este estudo tem, igualmente, em consideração vários aspetos metodológicos que visam contribuir para a qualidade da investigação da relação cultura-performance.

Different forms of inter-organisational encounters, including joint ventures, alliances, mergers and acquisitions, have over the last decades become fashionable and much-sought means of globalisation. A continuous concern shared by managers involved in these different forms of inter-organisational encounters is the challenge of making them work in practice – their successful implementation and management. The cultural dimensions of these different kinds of inter-organisational encounters, particularly in cross-border contexts, have been deplored as being particularly difficult. This paper builds on prior research and aims to understand how the cultural dimensions of inter-organisational encounters have been approached by researchers on mergers and acquisitions on the one hand and researchers on alliances and joint ventures on the other hand. Based on a comparative literature review, the findings suggest that the two fields, despite their valuable contributions and the similarities in the phenomena they study, have remained surprisingly isolated from one another and would offer opportunities for cross-fertilisation. Through its theoretical contribution, the paper intends to offer insights to researchers in both streams of research.

While many culture researchers have devoted numerous articles to the nature and definitions of culture, relatively fewer articles have contributed towards culture and performance research. The purpose of this study is to investigate the possible relationships between corporate culture and organizational performance among Singaporean companies. The objectives of this study are twofold: first, it aims to investigate the validity of the culture construct. Can culture construct be operationalized along distinct, repeatable dimensions? Second, it attempts to assess how culture affects organizational performance. The organizational culture profile was used as the primary research instrument. Culture was found to impact a variety of organizational processes and performance. While more research remains to be done in this area, this study has demonstrated the power of culture in influencing organizational performance.

This study aims to investigate the relationship between organizational culture and performance. It concerns the aspects of culture related to culture strength and unbalance and its impact on introvert and extrovert firm performance, controlling for business environment and size.

Based on the competing values model (CVM), culture strength is measured as the intensity of the culture values driving the company. The cultural unbalance is measured by the sum of absolute deviations of organizational members’ culture perceptions across the four archetypes (adhocracy, clan, hierarchy and market) imposed by CVM from the individual “average” shared cultural value. Evidence is drawn upon a sample of 1,305 employees of 114 Greek firms.

The findings indicate a strong positive relationship between culture strength and internal performance (innovation competence and human relations) as well as firm outcomes (profitability, growth and reputational assets). On the contrary, culture unbalance exerts a negative influence to market position, growth and innovation competence.

Understanding the nature of the association between culture strength, unbalance and firm performance would enable academics and practitioners to reflect critically on the core culture values which shape employee involvement and formulate leaders’ quality improvement decisions and actions, so as to achieve sustainable competitive advantage at the organizational level.

This research provides supporting empirical evidence for the culture–performance link by identifying the principle culture value characteristics (strength and unbalance), which exert both direct and interaction effects on the introvert and extrovert aspects of firm performance.

Although the extant literature widely recognizes the impact of corporate culture on performance, such findings are either speculative or mostly based on US companies, thus may not be generalisable to other national settings. In addition, while industry effect is considered in a few studies, its combined effect with other factors on performance has not been explored. This study modifies the existing model of corporate culture on performance by adding industry effect to the model. This is also the first study that tests such a relationship in a Middle East setting. Due to its unique culture, data collection in the Middle East region has been difficult if not impossible. More research in this region is needed since most of it is still in its infancy. This study investigates firms in Bahrain, the financial hub of the Arab World, to shed some insight onto this region. The results confirm a positive relation between Culture and performance and marginal industry effect between banks and hotels.

The aim of the study was to examine the relationship between transformational leadership and organizational cultural orientations, as well as the joint effect of transformational leadership and organizational culture on business unit performance.

About 300 employees of a large financial organization in Greece filled in a number of questionnaires measuring organizational culture orientations and transformational leadership. The measurement of business unit performance was obtained by the organization under study.

A path analysis showed that the achievement and adaptive cultural orientations had a direct effect on performance. Moreover, transformational leadership and humanistic orientation had an indirect positive impact on performance via achievement orientation.

A research limitation is that the causal direction of the relations between the predictors and the criteria has been partially established by controlling for the effect of past performance on the perceptions of organizational culture and leadership.

On a practical level the findings suggest that constructive and positive social relations at work need to be accompanied by goal setting and task accomplishment if high organizational performance is to be achieved.

The originality of this study concerns the finding that organizational culture mediates the effect of transformational leadership on business unit performance.