WMBA 6020 Week 2 Culture Model Assessment Example

Strong on Consistency, Weak on Creating Change: Rating a 92-Year-Old Title Insurer on Denison's Four Traits and Twelve Indexes, With a Document or a Decision Behind Every Score

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6020: Fostering a Culture of Innovation

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

Strong on Consistency, Weak on Creating Change: Rating a 92-Year-Old Title Insurer on Denison's Four Traits and Twelve Indexes, With a Document or a Decision Behind Every Score

Purpose and Model

This assessment rates the culture of Ashgrove, the invented 640-person title and escrow firm from Week 1, against the culture model developed by Daniel Denison and colleagues. The model was chosen because it was built to link culture to effectiveness, and because one of its four traits, adaptability, speaks directly to whether an organization can absorb new ideas.

Denison and Mishra (1995) proposed four traits. Involvement concerns whether people at every level are engaged in and capable of their work. Consistency concerns whether shared values and well-coordinated systems hold the organization together. Adaptability concerns whether the organization reads its environment, especially its customers, and turns what it learns into change. Mission concerns whether the organization knows where it is going. Two of the traits face inward, involvement and consistency, and two face outward, adaptability and mission. The model also pairs them along a second line: involvement and adaptability describe flexibility, while consistency and mission describe stability, so an organization can be strong on one side and weak on the other. Later survey work divided each trait into three indexes, giving twelve in all, and those indexes structure the ratings below.

A rule for this assessment: every rating must rest on something an outsider could verify, such as a written policy, a recurring meeting, a survey result or a decision that could have gone another way. Impressions are noted separately where they differ from the evidence.

Ratings

Table 1

Twelve Indexes Rated High, Moderate or Low, With Evidence

Ratings are the writer's judgments from company documents and records; the company and its evidence are composite.

The profile has a clear shape. Consistency is high on every index, involvement is mixed and adaptability is low on two of three. Mission splits between strong short-term goals and a weak long-term vision.

What the Pattern Means for New Ideas

High consistency is not a fault. For a title insurer it is close to the core of the product: a policy issued in Louisville must mean exactly what a policy issued in Columbus means, and the published underwriting manual, the single production system and the shared checklist make that possible. The same strengths, however, make deviation visible and costly. A new product cannot follow the manual because the manual does not cover it, and a closer who tries something different has no authority to do so.

Research using the model has found that consistency's relationship with business performance depends on the levels of the other traits, rather than being good in itself (Kotrba et al., 2012). Read with that finding, Ashgrove's profile suggests consistency is being bought at the expense of adaptability. The organization coordinates superbly around what it already does, and it lacks a mechanism for learning from what goes wrong or for trying something it has not done.

The low rating on organizational learning matters most. Errors at Ashgrove enter the system as claims, are paid, and are tracked as losses. No step asks what the error revealed about the process. Cannon and Edmondson (2005) argued that organizations rarely learn from failure because identifying, analyzing and discussing failures all run against both individual instincts and organizational systems. Ashgrove's claims process is a system built for paying failures, not studying them.

Where Impressions Differ From the Evidence

Two impressions differ from the documented ratings. Many employees would say Ashgrove is customer-focused, and with lenders it is. But the evidence shows no survey, product or process aimed at homeowners, who are the people the deed fraud alert proposal described in Week 1 would have served. The second impression concerns empowerment. Branch managers describe their offices as independent, and on scheduling and staffing they are. On anything touching a policy, they are not. The rating reflects the narrower authority, because new ideas usually touch policies.

Limits

The ratings are one person's reading of documents and decisions, not results from the validated survey that accompanies the model. A full assessment would administer the survey to a sample across branches and roles and compare results with published norms. The documentary approach used here has one advantage: it shows what the organization does, which may differ from what a survey shows people believe. The two would be worth comparing. If the survey showed employees rating adaptability higher than the documents do, that gap would itself be a finding: it would suggest people believe the company welcomes change because leaders say so, while its systems say otherwise. If the survey agreed with the documents, the case for changing the systems would be stronger still, because staff would already see the problem the paper describes.

Conclusion

Ashgrove's culture is strong, consistent and well aimed at its current business. Its weakest traits, creating change and learning, are the two most needed to support the genuinely new ideas its leaders say they want. Later weeks will ask how to raise them without damaging the consistency the business depends on.

References

Cannon, M. D., & Edmondson, A. C. (2005). Failing to learn and learning to fail (intelligently): How great organizations put failure to work to innovate and improve. Long Range Planning, 38(3), 299-319. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.lrp.2005.04.005

Denison, D. R., & Mishra, A. K. (1995). Toward a theory of organizational culture and effectiveness. Organization Science, 6(2), 204-223. https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.6.2.204

Kotrba, L. M., Gillespie, M. A., Schmidt, A. M., Smerek, R. E., Ritchie, S. A., & Denison, D. R. (2012). Do consistent corporate cultures have better business performance? Exploring the interaction effects. Human Relations, 65(2), 241-262. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726711426352