WMBA 6615 Week 4 Competing Values Culture Audit Example

A Competing Values Audit of Cedar Fork Engineering: Market Strong, Hierarchy Strong, Clan Weak and Adhocracy Nearly Absent, Each Rating Defended From a Policy, a Meeting or a Dashboard

Student Name

Walden University

WMBA 6615: Building Organizational Culture: Leaders as Architects

Instructor Name

Month Day, Year

A Competing Values Audit of Cedar Fork Engineering: Market Strong, Hierarchy Strong, Clan Weak and Adhocracy Nearly Absent, Each Rating Defended From a Policy, a Meeting or a Dashboard

The Model and the Method

This audit applies the competing values framework, which Cameron and Quinn (2011) developed to describe organizational cultures along two dimensions: whether an organization emphasizes flexibility or stability, and whether it focuses inward or outward. The two dimensions produce four culture types: clan, focused inward and flexible, valuing collaboration and development; adhocracy, focused outward and flexible, valuing innovation; market, focused outward and stable, valuing competition and results; and hierarchy, focused inward and stable, valuing control and efficiency.

The organization is Cedar Fork Engineering, a composite civil engineering firm of 340 people in six North Carolina offices, where I manage transportation projects. Evidence comes from documents I can access, meetings I attend and dashboards I use. Each dimension is rated strong, moderate, weak or absent, based on how much the firm's practices reinforce it.

Market: Competition and Results

What is tested: whether the firm organizes itself around winning work and hitting measurable targets.

Evidence. First, the utilization dashboard: every group's billable percentage is shown on monitors on each floor, updated daily, against a firm target of 82 percent. Second, the Monday staff meeting opens every week with signed backlog, the dollar value of contracts won but not yet performed. Third, the project manager bonus formula: 50 percent depends on project profit margin, 30 percent on new work won and 20 percent on client satisfaction.

Rating: strong. Every major routine, daily, weekly and annual, measures results against targets. The client satisfaction element shows an outward focus, but it is weighted lightly beside profit and new work, and it, too, is a scored target.

Hierarchy: Control and Efficiency

What is tested: whether the firm emphasizes procedures, approvals and predictable operations.

Evidence. First, the quality control manual requires a licensed engineer's review and stamp on every deliverable, with a checklist of 46 items for roadway plans. Second, contract approvals: any proposal above $250,000 needs a principal's signature, and above $1 million, the executive committee's. Third, the timesheet system, which rejects entries to projects without an approved budget and flags any project over 90 percent of budget for review.

Rating: strong. Much of this is required by the profession and by public clients, which demand licensed review and cost control. But the firm goes beyond requirements: the 90 percent budget flag triggers a meeting with the group leader, and project managers describe spending more time explaining variances than solving design problems.

Clan: Collaboration and Development

What is tested: whether the firm invests in its people, teamwork and a sense of belonging.

Evidence. First, the mentoring program: the handbook promises every new engineer a mentor within a month, but only 9 of 31 engineers hired in 2025 received one. Second, onboarding: new hires receive an eight-hour nonbillable code and are expected on a project by midweek. Third, the employee engagement survey, run every two years, last showed 48 percent agreeing that "my development is a priority here," and no action plan followed its release.

Rating: weak. Collaboration happens inside project teams, where engineers help each other under deadline pressure, and survey crews show strong loyalty to each other. But the firm's systems do not fund development: mentoring has no time code, onboarding is capped and survey results produce no visible response.

Adhocracy: Innovation and Risk-Taking

What is tested: whether the firm encourages new approaches, experiments and creative risk.

Evidence. First, the firm has no budget for research or internal development projects; all time must be charged to a client or to a capped overhead code. Second, design competitions, which once showcased innovative work, were dropped in 2020 to cut nonbillable time. Third, when a group in the Charlotte office proposed piloting new modeling software in 2025, the proposal required a business case showing payback within one year and was declined.

Rating: nearly absent. Innovation at Cedar Fork happens when a client requests and pays for it, as with the drone surveys the firm now offers because a state agency required them. The firm adopts new methods once they are paid for, but does not create space to try them.

The Profile and What It Predicts

Table 1

Competing Values Profile, Cedar Fork Engineering

Ratings are the author's judgment from the evidence listed; the firm is composite.

Cedar Fork's profile is weighted toward stability and results, the market and hierarchy quadrants. Hartnell et al. (2011) pooled studies that used the framework and found clan cultures tied most closely to how employees feel about their work, while market cultures tied more closely to operating and financial results. That fits what Cedar Fork shows: it is profitable and well controlled, and it struggles to keep young engineers, and about 18 percent of its engineers in their first five years walk out the door annually.

The profile also suggests where change is cheapest. Adding clan practices requires mainly time, which the firm can grant through its timesheet rules, while building an adhocracy dimension requires tolerance for projects that may fail, a larger cultural shift for a firm so focused on control. That difference should shape the order of any change plan.

Limits of the Audit

The audit relies on one employee's access and observation, mostly at headquarters. Cameron and Quinn (2011) recommend a survey instrument completed by many members, which would test whether others see the same profile. The ratings also simplify: survey crews show a strong clan culture within their own group, which the firm-wide rating hides. Schein and Schein (2017) warn that culture audits capture artifacts and espoused values more easily than underlying assumptions, and the assumption that seems to drive Cedar Fork, that only billable time has value, would need interviews to confirm.

References

Cameron, K. S., & Quinn, R. E. (2011). Diagnosing and changing organizational culture: Based on the competing values framework (3rd ed.). Jossey-Bass.

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

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