LEAD 6323 Module 1 Organizational Culture Analysis Example

Hierarchy at 41, Clan Wanted at 31: A Competing Values Culture Analysis of a State Public Health Laboratory After the Pandemic

Student Name

American College of Education

LEAD6323: Organizational Behavior and Culture

Module 1 Assignment

Instructor Name

October 12, 2026

Introduction

I am deputy director of a composite state public health laboratory with about 140 staff: microbiologists, chemists, molecular scientists, laboratory technicians, couriers and administrative staff. During the pandemic the laboratory tripled its testing volume, hired quickly and built a genomic sequencing unit almost overnight. Since then, turnover in the molecular sections has reached 24% a year, and the new sequencing scientists describe the laboratory as rigid. This paper diagnoses the laboratory's culture using two models, the competing values framework to measure it and the levels-of-culture approach to interpret it, as a first step toward understanding the behavior and turnover the rest of this course will examine.

The Competing Values Framework

This framework crosses two tensions, between flexibility and control and between looking inward and looking outward, and the four corners of that grid give four types of culture: clan, collaborative and people-centered; adhocracy, innovative and entrepreneurial; market, competitive and results-driven; and hierarchy, controlled and process-oriented. Hartnell et al. (2011) meta-analyzed 84 studies using the framework and found that clan, adhocracy and market cultures were each positively associated with measures of effectiveness, including employee attitudes, operational performance such as innovation and quality, and financial performance, though not always as the framework predicted, and the internal structure the framework proposes was only partly supported. The framework is therefore a useful map with known limits, not a precise theory.

Measuring Current and Preferred Culture

In September, 96 of 140 staff completed an anonymous culture survey based on the framework, dividing 100 points among four descriptions on six dimensions, once for the laboratory as it is and once for the laboratory as they would prefer. The current culture averaged 41 for hierarchy, 22 for market, 21 for clan and 16 for adhocracy. The preferred culture averaged 31 for clan, 30 for hierarchy, 24 for adhocracy and 15 for market. Staff want somewhat less hierarchy, much more collaboration and more room to innovate. The gap was largest among molecular and sequencing staff, whose preferred clan score averaged 36, and smallest among long-serving microbiologists, many of whom rated the current hierarchy as appropriate for a regulated laboratory.

Reading the Scores in Context

A public health laboratory has good reasons for a strong hierarchy culture. Testing errors can mislabel an outbreak or clear a contaminated water supply; federal certification and quality standards demand documented procedures, sign-offs and audits. The survey does not show that the hierarchy is wrong. It shows that staff experience it as extending into areas where control is not needed, and that the clan and adhocracy cultures that support retention and innovation are weak. The question for leaders is not whether to keep the controls that protect test quality, but where the controls end and the room for judgment begins.

Three Levels of Culture

Scores describe a culture's shape but not its roots. Schein and Schein (2017) treat culture as layered, from what a visitor can see and hear, through the values people announce, down to assumptions so settled that no one thinks to state them, which are the layer that actually steers behavior. Reading the laboratory at each level adds depth that the survey cannot provide.

Artifacts

The laboratory's artifacts are easy to see. Standard operating procedures fill binders on every bench. Any change to a method, even reformatting a worksheet, requires three signatures. Meetings follow a fixed agenda set by section supervisors, and scientists below the supervisor level rarely speak. The sequencing unit, by contrast, works from shared online documents edited by everyone, holds stand-up meetings and has a whiteboard of ideas; when its scientists moved into the main building, other staff described their area as chaotic. Even the building tells the story: supervisors' offices line the window side of each floor, while bench scientists work in interior rooms, and the break room posts a list of protocol violations by section each month.

Espoused Values

The laboratory's stated values, printed in its strategic plan, are scientific integrity, service to the public, teamwork and innovation. Staff readily endorse the first two. Teamwork and innovation, in the survey's open comments, were described as words on a poster: "We say innovation, but every new idea needs a committee." A senior chemist offered a different reading, that innovation without discipline is how laboratories lose certification, a view that deserves weight and that later modules will need to respect.

Underlying Assumptions

Beneath the artifacts and values lies an assumption that staff rarely state but that explains much: that any error reflects a personal failure, not a system problem. When a specimen mix-up occurred last year, the technician involved was retrained and placed on a corrective action plan; the specimen intake process, which had changed three times during the pandemic, was not reviewed. Staff learned that admitting mistakes is risky, which pushes the culture toward more sign-offs and less candor. This assumption also explains the clash with the sequencing unit, whose scientists treat failed runs as data rather than as failures.

Subcultures, Not One Culture

Treating the laboratory as having one culture would miss what the survey shows most clearly. Mannion and Davies (2018), writing on culture and quality improvement in health care, cautioned that organizations rarely have a single culture; they contain subcultures, often aligned with professions, departments and history, and attempts to change culture need to recognize them. The laboratory has at least three. Long-serving microbiologists and chemists hold a strong quality-control subculture formed under decades of federal certification. The pandemic-era molecular and sequencing staff hold a faster, more experimental subculture formed in a crisis. Couriers and administrative staff, whose survey responses differed little between current and preferred culture, describe themselves as outside both. The tension between the first two subcultures, more than any laboratory-wide trait, explains the clash staff describe.

Culture and Turnover

Exit interviews from the 23 staff who left the molecular sections in the past year connect culture to retention. The most common reason after pay was what departing scientists called the approval culture: waiting weeks for permission to change a workflow, being excluded from decisions about methods they knew best and feeling blamed for problems caused by systems. Several left for private laboratories and universities that, they said, trusted them more. The culture analysis therefore matters for operations as well as morale: the laboratory cannot sustain its genomic surveillance capacity if it keeps losing the scientists who built it.

Conclusion

The laboratory's culture is a strong hierarchy, appropriate for test quality, extended into areas where it suppresses collaboration and innovation, and anchored by an unspoken assumption that errors are personal failures. Staff, especially in the newer molecular sections, want more clan and adhocracy culture, and the turnover in those sections suggests the gap matters. The rest of this course will examine motivation, structure, group dynamics and, finally, a culture change plan that keeps the controls that protect the public while changing the assumption that makes the controls feel like distrust.

References

Hartnell, C. A., Ou, A. Y., & Kinicki, A. (2011). Organizational culture and organizational effectiveness: A meta-analytic investigation of the competing values framework's theoretical suppositions. Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(4), 677-694. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021987

Mannion, R., & Davies, H. (2018). Understanding organisational culture for healthcare quality improvement. BMJ, 363, Article k4907. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.k4907

Schein, E. H., & Schein, P. A. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership (5th ed.). Wiley.