Organizational cultures that support community: Does the competing values framework help us understand experiences of community at work?

Abstract

Recent evidence has shown that when employees experience perceptions of community at work (i.e., a sense of community and a sense of community responsibility), psychological well‐being and behavioral engagement improve (e.g., greater job engagement, organizational citizenship, and leadership). Recent evidence also shows that experiences of community, as a motivational state, are better able to predict employee outcomes compared to a series of factors that have long been studied in the general management (i.e., affective organizational commitment, organizational identity) and in the public management literature (i.e., public service motivation). However, we know less about the conditions that lead to perceptions of community experiences at work. One recent qualitative investigation exposed a series of organizational conditions that appear to stimulate perceptions of community at work including C‐Suite leadership support, organizational structure and context, characteristics of connection, managerial, job, and work unit characteristics, and responsibilities of human resource management professionals. The present study extends this study by empirically investigating organizational cultural conditions that are associated with perceptions of community at work. We test the ability of the Competing Values Framework, which includes constructs of Hierarchy, Market, Adhocracy, and Clan organizational cultures, and their ability to predict perceptions of the community. Findings showed that clan culture was most associated with perceptions of community in general and that clan culture within a department plays an important role in perceiving community at work. This study helps scholars understand cultural conditions that can lead to psychological experiences of community, it begins to frame cultural factors that scholars can empirically test in future studies, and it assists executives and managers in conceiving approaches to building cultures of community at work.

Building community at work: An exploratory study in healthcare system management

“…Employees see work as a component of their holistic life and therefore want managers who care about them and want to help them achieve their aspirations. These findings are consistent with other research (Boyd & Larson, 2022) which showed that experiences of the community are more likely built in proximal environments as opposed to the distal environment of the organization as a whole. They also highlight that HR professionals, and managers, should pay particular attention to building organizational cultures of community within work units.…”

“…The second study was designed as a quantitative assessment of cultural types that can lead to experiences of community, and it included executives, system leaders, mid‐managers, and line employees. The second study is reported in a separate manuscript (Boyd & Larson, 2022).…”

Rethinking Informed Consent as an EPA in Surgery

“…We also urge a more focused examination of where EPAs best fit within the training continuum of residency and fellowship training. At minimum, department chairs and program directors need to periodically undertake value and/ or culture scans [28][29][30] of their residencybased learning environments to better capture the underlying ethical and structural drivers that enrich and sustain what is, after all, a professionally oriented and values-based moral enterprise. 31 While competencies and EPAs are important adjuncts to learning, they are not a substitute for values.…”