OCI
Organizational Culture Inventory Paper
Latoya Williams
Keller Graduate School of Management

Introduction/Abstract The organization/unit that I have selected to study is from a previous place of employment. The previous place of employment was at ASA College in Brooklyn. At this place of employment I had to work with a group of people to get the day to day task done. We we’re all required to assist students in the purchasing of textbooks and other school supplies they may have needed, we had to stock and do inventory, we had to do cash, credit, and financial aid transactions, we also had to move at a certain pace because the bookstore was at most times a fast pace environment so we had to be able to keep up with the work load. For the most part we we’re working under the supervision of different managers of the bookstore sometimes 1 or 2 of them in a day so we had to make sure that we made as little mistakes as possible.

Organizational Culture Inventory The culture of the organization/unit is Constructive; this culture consists of four organizational culture styles which are Achievement, Self-actualizing, Humanistic-encouraging, and Affiliative. The constructive norms are cultural styles that promote satisfaction behaviors. The organizations primary style is Self-actualizing which has the greatest extension on the circumplex, the secondary style is Oppositional which has the second greatest extension on the circumplex, and the weakest style of the organization/unit is dependent. The meaning of these results show to me that although my organization is big on self development, taking on interesting activities, and gaining enjoyment from their work, task accomplishment, and individual growth, that as an organization because we are so critical we often oppose the ideas of others and because of that it makes it hard for people to try and impress us.

The behaviors that are associated with my organization/units current culture are Achievement, Self-actualizing, Humanistic/encouraging, and Affiliative. The achievement culture characterizes organizations that do things well and value the members of the organization. The members of the organization are expected to set challenging goals which are realistic, have plans to reach these goals, and go about pursuing them with enthusiasm. The self-actualizing culture characterizes organizations that value creativity, quality over quantity and both individual growth and task accomplishment. Members of this organization are more so into their own individual development, they also have to gain enjoyment from their work, and take on new and interesting activities. The humanistic/encouraging culture characterizes organizations that are managed in a more participative and person centered way. The members are expected to be constructive as well as supportive and open to influence with dealing with each other. The affiliative culture characterizes organizations that place high priority on interpersonal relationships. Members of this organization have to be friendly, sensitive, and be open to the satisfaction of their work group. My personal observations and experiences as part of my organization is that although we worked together as a team we still tried our best to stand out individually as workers to show our managers that we could work well under pressure together or alone and we we’re able to do this whenever some of our other counterparts went to lunch or sometimes didn’t come into work. We we’re also friendly towards one other for the most part and got along well. We also we’re open to the satisfaction of our work group because we knew that together tasks would get completed much faster. We we’re also constructive with one another in the sense that if someone wasn’t completing a task right we would tell them that they we’re doing it wrong and show them the right way to do it. I also observed that the behaviors associated with the primary style were the valuing of creativity, quality over quantity, task accomplishment and individual growth, development of one’s self, enjoyment of work, and the taking on of new and interesting activities. For the most part we reinforced a couple of those behaviors such as task accomplishment, taking on of new and interesting activities. The behaviors associated with the weakest styles which we’re not enforced by my organizations current culture was conformity, punishment of mistakes, failure to reward success, controlling of subordinates, and rewarding of members for out-performing one another. The targets for my organization/unit’s cultural change are approval, avoidance, oppositional, and perfectionistic. The greatest gap between my organization’s current score and ideal score is 35, this big of a gap came from the perfectionistic style. The second greatest gap between current score and ideal score is 27, this gap came from the approval style. Three behaviors that my organization/unit’s should encourage would be to continue working hard, be more persistent, and try to avoid as many mistakes as possible if a mistake is made try to get up on top of it as quickly as possible. Three behaviors that my organization/unit’s should discourage would be to avoid punishment of mistakes, decreasing of taking more chances, and the failure to reward success.

OCI Style | Your
Raw Score | Your
Percentile Score | Typical Ideal
Percentile Score* | 1. Humanistic-Encouraging | 36 | 49% | 85% | 2. Affiliative | 39 | 52% | 71% | 3. Approval | 28 | 54% | 27% | 4. Conventional | 25 | 37% | 18% | 5. Dependent | 27 | 31% | 24% | 6. Avoidance | 20 | 51% | 27% | 7. Oppositional | 25 | 69% | 45% | 8. Power | 24 | 47% | 30% | 9. Competitive | 24 | 59% | 42% | 10. Perfectionistic | 31 | 60% | 25% | 11. Achievement | 39 | 60% | 78% | 12. Self-Actualizing | 38 | 73% | 82% |

The potential benefits to efforts to change my current culture toward the ideal culture would be more satisfied workers in terms of recognition for their work, more challenging goals will be set to better improve work quality, more tasks that will improve the development of workers individually, increase in current diversity the more ethnicity the more ideas which will be new and different from the many other cultures already there, more team workshops to increase the high performance of my members, decrease the chances of members getting more work than others all members should be able to develop and maximize their contributions equally, etc. The potential risk benefits to efforts to change my current culture toward the ideal culture would be that members within the organization might not be willing to change because there use to the culture of the organization being one way and to try and oppose change on them they might not be so quick to adjust to the new changes being made. How can I think more in terms of a team rather than individually? Although I am a great team player and I have no problems working in teams the majority of the time, I still think individually and I realized this when doing the desert survival exercise because while doing it instead of thinking how would I survive on a desert with my teammates I was thinking how would I survive individually on my own and at the end of the exercise the results showed that me and my other two teammates we’re thinking in the same way so I want to get out of that individualistic mind frame because the career I wish to get into requires a lot of team work and I want to be able to excel more in that area so that I can have a successful career.