Analysing your culture

circumplex

We use the Human Synergistics model to benchmark and then analyse your organisational culture.

It’s called the Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI) and the circumplex visual we use identifies 12 different behavioural norms, identifying those that people think are required by their organisation. These cluster into three distinct types of culture, Constructive, Passive/defensive and Aggressive/defensive around the circumplex.

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What does your culture look like?

Let’s take a closer look at the distinct cultures within each of those three clusters. See if you can spot your own business:

constructive
The Constructive culture that encourages the satisfaction of their people
  • Achievement (11o’clock) – people are expected to set, and plan for, challenging goals.
  • Self-actualising (12 o’clock) – people are expected to enjoy their work and develop their own skills and interests.
  • Humanistic Encouraging (1 o’clock) – people are expected to be supportive and encouraging of one another
  • Affiliative (2 o’clock) – people are expected to be friendly, co-operative and sensitive to their peers
passive
The Passive/Defensive culture that encourages self-protective behaviour in interactions with people
  • Approval (3 o’clock) – people are expected to agree with and be liked by others
  • Conventional (4 o’clock) – people are expected to conform and make a good impression
  • Dependent (5 o’clock) – people are expected to do what they’re told and clear every decision with superiors
  • Avoidance (6 o’clock) – people are expected to be shift responsibility so they can never be blamed for a mistake
aggressive
The Aggressive/Defensive culture that encourages self-protective behaviour in interactions with tasks
  • Oppositional (7 o’clock) – people are expected to criticise others and their ideas
  • Power (8 o’clock) – people are expected to take charge and control subordinates
  • Competitive (9 o’clock) – people are expected to work against, not with, their peers
  • Perfectionist (10 o’clock) – people are expected to avoid all mistakes and work long hours to hit goals

Creating targets for cultural change

Once identified, we then benchmark your organisational culture to those of other businesses as well as the typical ideal culture profile, created with responses from hundreds of employees from nearly 60 businesses in multiple sectors.

Using the ideal profile, you can identify the largest gaps between your own organisation and the ideal and begin to create targets for cultural change and define your goals based on the kind of behaviours you want to encourage to narrow the gap.

typical