Competing Values Framework

What the Competing Values Framework is

The Competing Values Framework (إطار القيم المتنافسة) is a model that sorts what an organisation values in its culture, and in judging its effectiveness, along two axes: flexibility against stability and control, and a focus on the inside against a focus on the outside. The two axes cross in 4 cells, and each cell is called a culture: clan, adhocracy, market and hierarchy. The framework is attributed to Robert Quinn and colleagues, and in the literature it is tied to the 1999 book by Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn, “Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture”.

The framework is a descriptive way of reading culture. It does not report that one of the four cultures is better than the others, and it is not a description of the cultures of organisations in the Kingdom.

Where the framework comes from

We checked the following works in Crossref. The records show that the works exist, and they do not show what the works contain:

• Quinn and Rohrbaugh. The article “A Spatial Model of Effectiveness Criteria: Towards a Competing Values Approach to Organizational Analysis” in Management Science, volume 29, issue 3, 1983, pages 363 to 377, and an earlier article titled “A Competing Values Approach to Organizational Effectiveness” in Public Productivity Review, volume 5, issue 2, 1981, page 122.
• Quinn and Cameron. The article “Organizational Life Cycles and Shifting Criteria of Effectiveness: Some Preliminary Evidence” in Management Science, volume 29, issue 1, 1983, pages 33 to 51.
• Hartnell, Ou and Kinicki. The article “Organizational culture and organizational effectiveness: A meta analytic investigation of the competing values framework’s theoretical suppositions” in the Journal of Applied Psychology, volume 96, issue 4, 2011, pages 677 to 694.

The Cameron and Quinn book is not recorded in Crossref as such, so the year 1999 rests on secondary summaries alone. We did not read any of the four works, so we quote no wording and no result from them. What we describe of the axes and the cultures is a summary in our own words of what secondary summaries pass on, some of them consultancy websites and not peer reviewed references. The Arabic names we use for the four cultures are a choice of ours and vary from one reference to another.

The two axes and the four cultures

The summaries describe the first axis as a question: is flexibility, adaptation and freedom of action valued, or stability, discipline and control? They describe the second axis as a question: does attention turn to the inside of the organisation and the cohesion of its people, or to the outside, to customers, competitors and the market? The four cultures that come from crossing the axes are presented as follows, with small differences in wording between sources:

• Clan. Flexibility with an internal focus. It is described as resembling an extended family and as valuing cohesion, participation and the development of individuals.
• Adhocracy. Flexibility with an external focus. It is described as valuing innovation, initiative and the acceptance of risk.
• Market. Stability and control with an external focus. It is described as valuing competition and the achievement of results and targets.
• Hierarchy. Stability and control with an internal focus. It is described as valuing standard procedures, regularity and operating efficiency.

The four names are names of cultures within the framework. The word hierarchy is not a criticism, and the word market does not refer to the culture of shops. The summaries state that one organisation combines features of more than one culture, which is why the framework offers a profile of proportions and not a single cell in which an organisation is placed.

How a culture profile is measured

Secondary summaries state that Cameron and Quinn built a questionnaire on the framework, abbreviated OCAI (Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument). In it the respondent distributes 100 points across 4 statements in each item, and each statement stands for one culture. The points are then averaged across respondents, and the profile of the organisation appears. The summaries add that the questionnaire is completed once for the organisation as it is today and once for what is wanted for it, so a gap appears between the two profiles. We did not see the instrument, its items or their number, so we describe only its idea.

How the framework differs from nearby concepts

• Organizational culture. The set of values, assumptions and patterns of behaviour that govern how work is actually done is defined under organizational culture. The framework is a way of sorting that culture into 4 cells, and it is not a definition of it.
• Levels of culture. The culture of an organisation is laid out in 3 levels, from the visible to the hidden, in the Schein Model of Organizational Culture. That model asks how deep a culture goes, and the framework asks what kind it is, so the two questions do not compete.
• National cultures. Comparing societies along dimensions is the business of Hofstede cultural dimensions, whereas the framework sorts the culture of one organisation or of a unit inside it.
• Adhocracy in another sense. The name is shared with Mintzberg organisational configurations, but the meaning is not. In the configurations the name stands for a structure in which mutual adjustment among the staff predominates, and in the framework it stands for a culture that values innovation. No source we reviewed links the two uses.
• Organization development. A planned and continuing effort to raise the effectiveness of an organisation by working on its structure, its processes and the behaviour of its people is covered by organization development. The framework is a tool for reading and not an effort of work. Our estimate is that a profile from it serves as material for a diagnosis that comes before such an effort, and does not replace it.

A hypothetical example: a culture profile in points

Take a small hypothetical company in which 5 employees each answered one item by distributing 100 points across statements standing for the four cultures, according to the state of the company today. Clan points were 30, 40, 20, 35 and 25, which total 150. Adhocracy points were 10, 15, 10, 5 and 10, which total 50. Market points were 20, 15, 30, 20 and 25, which total 110. Hierarchy points were 40, 30, 40, 40 and 40, which total 190. The grand total is 150 + 50 + 110 + 190 = 500, which is 5 × 100 as it should be.

The averages, found by dividing each total by 5, are 30 for clan, 10 for adhocracy, 22 for market and 38 for hierarchy, and together they come to 100. The same five then answered the same item for what they want for the company in two years. The averages of that preferred profile were 40 for clan, 25 for adhocracy, 20 for market and 15 for hierarchy, and together they come to 100.

The differences between preferred and current are an increase of 10 for clan, an increase of 15 for adhocracy, a decrease of 2 for market and a decrease of 23 for hierarchy. The increases total 25 and the decreases total 25, because each profile totals 100.

The figures are hypothetical and were set to illustrate. They do not represent an organisation or a study. One item and 5 respondents are not enough for a real profile, and a profile records what the respondents perceived and not what the company does. It does not say that a move from hierarchy toward adhocracy brings about a particular result, because that is a judgement that needs a source we do not hold.

How to read a profile before building a decision on it

Human resources is in a position to start with questions of our own: who answered, how many of them, and do they represent every department or only one? Do the profiles differ between departments? In the example the hierarchy average was 38, but a department whose employees see the picture reversed would not show in that average. Is the gap between current and preferred a real disagreement over direction, or a difference in how the statements of the questionnaire were understood? These questions remain an opening for a conversation with managers, and they are not an introduction to a verdict on the culture.

The limits of the framework

• Perception and not a measure of behaviour. The profile is built on the answers of employees to statements, so it reflects what they perceived and does not prove what goes on in the work.
• A deliberate simplification. Four cells on two axes are a short picture. In our estimate, many organisations hold features that the four names do not cover.
• An academic origin in organisational effectiveness. The articles recorded in Crossref concern the effectiveness of organisations and research on it, and the step from them to a tool for diagnosing culture reached us through the summaries.
• A Saudi context not examined. In the sources we reviewed, we found no Saudi study that we adopt on the framework in Saudi organisations.
• A tool with a fixed form. The questionnaire in circulation has particular items and a particular form, and we did not see it. A simplified questionnaire built on the four names is not that instrument.

How the framework is misunderstood

• Treating the four cultures as a ranking from weakest to strongest. They are descriptive cells, and the summaries say that each culture has an area in which it values what suits it.
• Choosing one name for the organisation. The profile is a set of distributed proportions, and reading only the highest proportion leaves out the rest.
• Reading the preferred profile as a plan. It is the preference of the respondents, and between a preference and a plan lie decisions and time.
• Mixing adhocracy as a culture with adhocracy as a structure. The name is shared and the meaning differs, as the comparison of the two frameworks shows.

The role of human resources

Human resources is in a position to use the framework as a shared language when managers want to speak of the culture of their organisation in more than the words good or bad. It asks which values the decisions of today reward and which ones the organisation wants to reward, and it gathers the observations of the questionnaire before a management meeting and presents them as open questions. The decision to change what the organisation rewards stays with whoever holds the decision, and human resources takes part in it through its knowledge of performance, promotion and training.

What the sources allow us to say

We do not state that a particular culture raises performance, innovation or satisfaction, or that an organisation moving from one profile to another achieves a particular result. We did not read the Cameron and Quinn book or the registered articles, and we did not see the results of the meta analysis that Crossref records, so we attribute no finding to it.

The better course is to treat the framework as a language for describing what an organisation values today and what it wants to value, and to judge any cultural decision by what appears in the organisation: whether the rules of promotion have become announced, and whether what is actually rewarded has changed. What is decided after that depends on the organisation and its work.

This is an explanation of the concept, not legal advice.