Title: Measurement of organizational culture, at health personnel of health centers in the Island of Crete
Abstract:
Background: Organizations are characterized by distinct types of culture, which affect the quality and efficiency of services provided. Specifically, organizational culture has been positively associated with organizational performance that contribute to quality of services, such as medical and nursing care, job satisfaction, patient safety and change of administration process.
Μethods: A cross-sectional design was employed to measure organizational culture. Five Health Centers were randomly selected out of a total of 11 Health Centers which are located in the prefectures of Heraklion and Rethimnon. The sample consisted of 77 health professionals 29.8% (23) were men and 70.1% (54) women. 32.4% were doctors, 35% were nurses and 32.4% other health professionals, such as social care workers, midwives and physiotherapists. In the current study, a Greek modified version of the organizational culture inventory (OCI), adapted with the permission of Human Synergistics International, was administered. The Greek modified version has been found to have satisfactory internal consistency, with Cronbach’s α of the 12 culture styles of OCI® ranging from 0.665 to 0.914, while the overall OCI rated α=0.900. Descriptive statistics were used to analyze the data. Unadjusted or raw total scores were converted into percentile scores for each of the twelve cultural styles. Comparison to a norming sample established the operating culture as well as cultural styles in Health Centers. Gap Analysis indicated areas for cultural change and improvement.
Results: The findings reveal that the operating culture of the 5 Health Centers is a combination of both aggressive – defensive (91%ile) and pathetic – defensive organizational culture (85.5%ile) whereas constructive culture is the least present (27.7%ile). Members in the Primary Health Care level are predominantly encouraged to oppositional behavioral styles (98%ile), closely followed by power and avoidance behavioral styles (97%ile). The greatest gap in the current culture of primary health care organizations and the typical ideal culture was in the avoidance culture scoring higher (87%) than the typical ideal profile followed by conventional (80%) and power culture (80%).
Conclusions: Targeted interventions should be undertaken in order to decrease employees’ Avoidance and Conventional behaviors and encourage specific Constructive behaviors such as Achievement and Humanistic, in order health care organizations operate efficiently and meet local health needs.
