IOP 460 Week 5 Diagnosing and Changing Culture Example

One Food Bank, Not Three: Diagnosing and Changing Culture a Year After a Merger

[Student Name]

University of Phoenix

IOP/460: Organizational Cultures

Week 5 Assignment

[Instructor Name]

[Date]

The food bank, its staff, survey and figures are composites written for a model paper; research and theory come from the sources listed.

Over the past four weeks, Valley Harvest Food Bank's merger has been examined through organizational types, structure, people, politics, symbols and learning. A year after the merger, its board asks a central question: are we one organization yet? This final paper diagnoses the food bank's culture and plans a change.

The Diagnosis Approach

Marisa Delgado, the consultant introduced in Week 1, uses several sources. A culture survey goes to all one hundred twenty staff and three hundred regular volunteers. Focus groups meet at each site. She observes distributions and staff meetings and reviews documents, such as policies and newsletters. Several sources protect against a common trap: what people say they value and what they actually do can differ.

A Framework for Culture

Cameron and Quinn (2011) offered a framework and a survey instrument for diagnosing organizational culture based on four types: clan, emphasizing collaboration, belonging and development; adhocracy, emphasizing innovation and flexibility; market, emphasizing results and competition; and hierarchy, emphasizing control, efficiency and procedures. Respondents rate their organization's current and preferred culture on several dimensions, producing profiles that show where people believe the culture is and where they want it to go. The authors recommended using the gaps between current and preferred profiles to guide change and involving members in interpreting results.

What the Survey Showed

The original Valley Harvest warehouse scores highest on clan culture, with strong collaboration and pride. Headquarters scores higher on hierarchy, reflecting the new approval processes added after the merger. The two merged pantries show low scores across all types, especially clan, consistent with fragmentation and a lost sense of belonging. Across all sites, staff prefer more clan culture and, at the pantries, more adhocracy, the freedom to adapt to neighborhood needs. Focus groups echo the numbers: "We used to decide things at our own table," a Casa de Pan staff member said. "Now we wait for headquarters."

Content, Context and Process

Armenakis and Bedeian (1999) sorted a decade of change research into four questions: what is changing, under what conditions inside and outside the organization, by what steps and judged by which results. They noted that change efforts often fail when leaders focus on content and neglect process, and they emphasized stages through which people move from readiness to adoption and finally to institutionalization of the change.

For the food bank, the content is a shared culture that keeps collaboration while giving sites more voice. The context includes a tight budget, the restricted donation dispute from Week 3 and holiday season demands. The process must involve staff from all three sites, since a culture of collaboration cannot be imposed from the top.

How People Experience Change

Oreg et al. (2011) reviewed sixty years of quantitative research on how change recipients react. How people responded depended on who they were, how the change was handled, what they expected to gain or lose and the setting around them, with having a say and hearing clear explanations among the strongest influences. Employees who resisted a change were later less satisfied, less attached to the organization and more likely to think about quitting.

At the food bank, pantry staff have already experienced a change imposed on them, the merger and the renaming plan. Research suggests their reactions to the next change will depend heavily on whether they help design it.

The pantry staff had been merged, renamed and reorganized; the one thing they had not been was asked.

The Change Plan

Priority one, months one to six: voice and belonging. Form a culture team with members from all three sites and volunteers. Implement the shared identity and allocation committee recommended in Week 3. Restore each site's rituals and celebrate them across the organization.

Priority two, months four to twelve: decision rights. Move routine decisions, such as distribution schedules and volunteer assignments, to site managers, as recommended in Week 2. Reduce headquarters approvals to those required for safety, finance and compliance.

Priority three, months six to eighteen: learning. Establish after-action reviews and near-miss reporting from Week 4, with cross-site participation, so that sites learn from one another.

Leaders will model the change: Pastor Mendez will hold office hours at each site monthly, and the board will review the culture team's progress quarterly.

Measuring Progress

Marisa will run the same culture survey again a year in and again at the eighteen-month mark. Additional measures include staff turnover by site, volunteer return rates, participation in cross-site meetings and the number of decisions made at site level. The plan will count as working if pantry staff rate their sites as more collaborative and if the distance between the culture they have and the one they want shrinks.

Anticipating Resistance

Some resistance is predictable. Headquarters staff may see shifting decisions to sites as a loss of control and a risk to consistency. The development director may worry that donors will be confused by site names. Longtime Valley Harvest volunteers may feel their traditions are being diluted. Each concern is legitimate and can be addressed: clear standards for safety and finance remain central, donors receive a single report with site stories and the original turkey drive keeps its place of honor. Naming these concerns early, and inviting the people who hold them onto the culture team, turns potential opponents into designers of the change.

Small Wins

Culture shifts when people see new behavior rewarded. The plan includes early, visible wins: the first site-level schedule decision announced in the newsletter, the first cross-site after-action review that leads to a change and the first allocation committee meeting with minutes shared with all staff. Each signals that the new way of working is real.

Reflection on the Course

The four frames each contributed to the plan. Structure clarifies decision rights; the human resource frame centers voice and development; the political frame addresses allocation; the symbolic frame honors identity and ritual. Learning practices make the change self-correcting. Culture change, the course suggests, requires working through all of them.

Conclusion

A multisource diagnosis showed that Valley Harvest is not yet one organization: the original site remains collaborative, headquarters has grown more controlling and the merged pantries feel adrift. A culture framework, research on the content, context and process of change and research on how people react to change support a staged plan that builds belonging, shifts decision rights and embeds learning, measured over eighteen months.

References

Armenakis, A. A., & Bedeian, A. G. (1999). Organizational change: A review of theory and research in the 1990s. Journal of Management, 25(3), 293-315. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639902500303

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

Oreg, S., Vakola, M., & Armenakis, A. (2011). Change recipients' reactions to organizational change: A 60-year review of quantitative studies. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 47(4), 461-524. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886310396550