Organizational Climate and Culture

The fields of organizational climate and organizational culture have co-existed for several decades with very little integration between the two. In Organizational Climate and Culture: An Introduction to Theory, Research, and Practice, Mark G. Ehrhart, Benjamin Schneider, and William H. Macey break down the barriers between these fields to encourage a broader understanding of how an organization’s environment affects its functioning and performance. Building on in-depth reviews of the development of both the organizational climate and organizational culture literatures, the authors identify the key issues that researchers in each field could learn from the other and provide recommendations for the integration of the two. They also identify how practitioners can utilize the key concepts in the two literatures when conducting organizational cultural inquiries and leading change efforts. The end product is an in-depth discussion of organizational climate and culture unlike anything that has come before that provides unique insights for a broad audience of academics, practitioners, and students.

"Ehrhart, Schneider, and Macey have created a rich, thoughtful, and comprehensive resource for scholars and practitioners. They lead us through a wide range of complex issues with style and substance. You'll know a lot more about culture and climate after you read it. I know I did!" -- Daniel Denison, Ph.D., IMD Business School, Switzerland"This book breaks new ground regarding the integration of scholarship and practice, quantitative and qualitative methods for studying and changing organizational climate and culture, and includes a sizeable body of literature." -- W. Warner Burke, Teachers College, Columbia University"This volume offers a powerful and scholarly overview of the climate and culture literatures and seeks to integrate them. The authors are hugely knowledgeable about these areas and so it is just a treasure trove of information. It offers new insights about the links between strategy and culture and offers a comprehensive overview of measurement methods for climate and culture.The authors take clear positions on some of the key controversies in the field, the writing is clear, there are good summaries at the end of each chapter, and some novel methods of communicating key issues to readers. One such method is the use of a summary of key critiques of some concepts with the authors' helpful responses to critiques. The authors do not, as so many academics do, sit on the fence in relation to key controversies." -- Michael West, Lancaster University, UK

Mark G. Ehrhart is Associate Professor at the Department of Psychology at San Diego State University. His research interests include organizational climate and culture, organizational citizenship behavior, leadership, and work stress, and the application of these topics across levels of analysis and in service and health/mental health settings. He has over 30 journal articles and book chapters on these topics, including in such journals as the Journal of Applied Psychology, Academy of Management Journal, Personnel Psychology, and the Journal of Management. He is on the editorial board for the Journal of Applied Psychology, and is a member of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP) and the Academy of Management.Benjamin Schneider is Senior Research Fellow at CEB and Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland. Ben’s interests concern organizational climate and culture, employee engagement, service quality, staffing issues, and the role of manager personality in organizational life. Ben has been awarded SHRM’s Michael R. Losey Award, SIOP’s Scientific Contributions Award, the Academy of Management’s HR Division Career Contributions Award, and the Academy of Management’s OB Division Lifetime Achievement Award.William H. Macey is Managing Director, Global Research Office at CEB and has more than 35 years of experience consulting with organizations to design and implement survey research programs. He served as an advisor to the Mayflower Group from 1992 to 2010 and is the co-author of several recent publications on employee engagement. He is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, the American Psychological Association, and the Association for Psychological Science, and is a SIOP past president.