The role of organizational climate and culture in the school  (Page 5/17)

As far back as 1932, Waller noted that“schools have a culture that is definitely their own”(p. 103). Waller went on to describe the rituals of personal relationships,the folkways, mores, irrational sanctions, moral codes, games, ceremonies, traditions, and laws that were so very similar in manyschools and which define what happens in schools. This perspective of a shared culture among schools has been commented on by manyobservers of the sociology of schools, including Deal (1993), Sarason (1996), and Swidler (1979). From this author’s conversations with educators and students around the globe andobservations in schools internationally, there is a basic culture of schooling that transcends national, ethnic, and socio-culturalborders. International exchange students often express how similar their host school is to their school in their native country. Inthis author’s experience, in developing nations there is often a greater cultural similarity between the private schools serving themore wealthy students and sub-urban schools in the U. S. than there is between those private schools and the public schools servingtheir nation’s poorer children. However, as Deal (1993) and Maehr and Buck (1993) commented, each school also possessesindividualized, unique cultural aspects. Schools have distinct personalities, highly unique ceremonies, and varying disciplinenorms. Some schools revere their athletic teams, whereas in other schools art, music, or drama programs are given great attention; inyet other schools, academic achievement is at the apex of community respect. Organizational culture can be a highly powerful force inthe school improvement process; given this definition of culture, it stands to reason that, as Owens (2004) noted, it may often bethe most powerful determinant of the course of change in an organization (p. 191).

Equipped with an understanding of the basic constructs of organizational climate and culture, the nextchallenge facing the leader of a school improvement process becomes the assessment of his or her school’s climate and culture. As Schein (1999, p. 86) noted pointedly, assessment of organizationalclimate and culture must be done in the specific context of some organizational problem or set of circumstances. Consequently, theassessment of the school’s climate and culture must be done specifically in the context of the proposed change(s) andimprovement process. The section that follows provides some methodological insight into that assessment process.

How Can One Assess an Organization’s Climate and Culture?

It is generally agreed that assessment of an organization’s climate is a relatively straight-forward process, especially when compared to the methodologies needed to assess theorganization’s culture. As climate is defined as individuals’perceptions, quantitative survey instruments have become the most widely accepted means of gathering and analyzing organizationalclimate data. The same is not true for the assessment of school culture; in fact, various authorities in the field (e.g., Schein,1999) assert that it absolutely cannot be measured quantitatively through surveys or questionnaires.