Assessing organizational culture is an essential step prior to the implementation of practice changes. In order to evaluate my organization, I selected the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI), which is a proven instrument of culture assessment (Cameron & Quinn, n.d.). The tool involves a set of statements designed to evaluate organizational culture in terms of four domains: clan, adhocracy, hierarchy, and market (Cameron & Quinn, n.d.). Based on the assessment, my organization has a Complete Culture, which is characterized by an emphasis on goals, deadlines, and results. The high score in this domain is justified by the management’s approach to performance improvement. In my organization, individual and team goals are set regularly, and there are rewards that depend on performance. For this reason, competition between colleagues is high, which impairs collaboration and could pose obstacles to practice change. Consequently, a low score in the Collaborative domain is also justified. Decreased cooperation and high competition among workers could pose problems in change implementation (Rycroft-Malone et al., 2015). Thus, my organization is not sufficiently prepared for a practice change.
Clinical inquiry could support my organization in addressing its weaknesses and developing competencies required for evidence-based practice change. Firstly, clinical inquiry should be implemented to assess the existing culture and its impact on individual employees and teams. For instance, both internal and external research could help to determine whether the organization benefits from its competitive culture, thus providing a rationale for culture change. Secondly, clinical inquiry could help to develop collaboration by implementing and testing management strategies that focus on teamwork, such as training or participative decision-making. These strategies would help to improve the organizational culture and prepare my workplace for evidence-based practice implementation.
References
- Cameron, K., & Quinn, R. (n.d.). About the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI). OCCAI Online. Web.
- Rycroft-Malone, J., Burton, C. R., Wilkinson, J., Harvey, G., McCormack, B., Baker, R., Dopson, S., Graham, I. D., Staniszewska, S., Thompson, C., Ariss, S., Melville-Richards, L., & Williams, L. (2015). Collective action for implementation: A realist evaluation of organisational collaboration in healthcare. Implementation Science, 11(1), 1-17.