Org, people & execution
Competing Values Framework
Maps organisational culture on two tensions, internal versus external focus and flexibility versus control, producing four competing culture types (Clan, Adhocracy, Hierarchy, Market) that can be profiled and compared, most commonly through Cameron and Quinn's OCAI survey.
Also known as CVF, Quinn and Rohrbaugh framework, Four culture types. First set out by Robert E. Quinn and John Rohrbaugh in 1983; the primary source is cited in full below.
- Format
- 2×2 matrix
- Level
- Corporate · Business unit · Team
- Best for
- Evaluate options · Plan execution
- Decision stage
- Diagnose · Plan
- Difficulty
- Intermediate
- Time to apply
- A half-day workshop for a leadership-team profile; two to four weeks for a full OCAI survey across a merged or multi-site organisation.
Plate · The model
The components
Clan
Internal focus with flexibility. The organisation as extended family: cohesion, participation, mentoring and morale. Leaders act as facilitators and parent figures, and success is defined in terms of people development and commitment.
Signals of strength
Long tenures and promotion from within · Consensus-seeking before decisions · Loyalty and tradition as the glue · Heavy investment in development and welfare · Discomfort with hard performance conversations
Adhocracy
External focus with flexibility. The organisation as temporary, entrepreneurial and creative: risk-taking, experimentation and being first. Leaders are innovators and visionaries, and success means new products and new markets.
Signals of strength
Fluid roles and shifting project structures · Tolerance of failed experiments · Individual initiative prized over procedure · Growth through novelty rather than share capture · Impatience with process and documentation
Hierarchy
Internal focus with stability and control. The organisation as formalised structure: procedures, defined roles and smooth-running operations. Leaders are coordinators and organisers, and success means efficiency, dependability and predictability.
Signals of strength
Documented processes governing most work · Clear reporting lines and sign-off chains · Stability and low error rates as the measures that matter · Change routed through formal programmes · Rules invoked to settle disagreements
Market
External focus with stability and control. The organisation as results machine: competition, targets and winning. Leaders are hard drivers and producers, and success means market share, revenue and beating rivals.
Signals of strength
League tables and individual targets displayed and discussed · Compensation tightly geared to results · Customers and competitors dominate internal language · Reputation for demanding, sometimes abrasive management · Low sentimentality about underperformance
When it earns its keep
- Two organisations are merging and you need a shared, discussable picture of how their cultures actually differ before the integration plan hardens.
- A strategy demands behaviours the organisation does not currently reward, and you want to locate the gap between the culture you have and the culture the strategy needs.
- Leadership talks about 'culture change' in vague terms and you need a structured profile, current versus preferred, to turn the conversation into decisions.
- You are diagnosing why an initiative keeps stalling, and suspect the cause is a culture pulling against it rather than a faulty plan.
And when it doesn't
- You need to understand why the culture is as it is. The CVF describes the profile; Schein's model digs into the underlying assumptions that produced it.
- The problem is one team's dysfunction rather than organisational culture. Team-level diagnostics such as Lencioni's model or Belbin analysis fit better.
- You want a precise measurement instrument for academic research. The OCAI's psychometrics are contested, and its forced-choice scoring limits statistical use.
- The four types are being read as boxes to sort companies into. Every real organisation is a blend, and treating the quadrant labels as verdicts flattens the diagnosis.
How to run it
Before starting, gather the inputs the analysis depends on:
- A defined unit of analysis: the whole organisation, a division or a site, agreed before anyone fills in a survey.
- Culture data from a reasonable cross-section of people, ideally via the OCAI's six dimensions, or at minimum structured interviews across levels and functions.
- A current-state and a preferred-state profile from the same respondents, since the gap between them is where the useful signal sits.
- A view of the strategy, because a culture profile only means something when read against what the organisation is trying to do.
- 1
Define the unit and the question
Agree what is being profiled and why. A merged firm's head office and its branch network can carry different cultures, and averaging them produces a profile that describes nobody.
- 2
Profile the current culture
Have respondents divide 100 points across the four types for each of the OCAI's six dimensions: dominant characteristics, leadership, management of employees, organisational glue, strategic emphases and criteria of success. The forced allocation is deliberate; it makes people express the trade-offs the framework is named for.
- 3
Profile the preferred culture
Repeat the exercise for the culture respondents believe the organisation needs in five years. Do this in the same sitting, from the same people, so current and preferred profiles are comparable.
- 4
Plot and read the gaps
Draw both profiles on the two axes. Gaps of ten points or more on any type are worth attention. Look also at spread: sharp disagreement between groups about the current culture is itself a finding, often the most important one.
- 5
Interpret against the strategy
Ask whether the dominant type supports what the organisation is trying to do. A Hierarchy-dominant culture is an asset for a business competing on reliability and a liability for one that needs to invent.
- 6
Translate into change actions
For each quadrant that must strengthen or recede, specify what more of it and less of it would look like in behaviour, symbols and systems. Cameron and Quinn are clear that the profile is the start of the work; the change effort is where value is created or lost.
Reading the result
A culture profile plotted on the two axes: the relative strength of Clan, Adhocracy, Hierarchy and Market in the current culture, the preferred future profile, and the gaps between them, read against the demands of the strategy.
- Read the dominant quadrant first, then the shape of the whole profile. A strong Market score means something different next to a strong Adhocracy than next to a strong Hierarchy.
- The current-versus-preferred gap is the agenda. A large gap on one type tells you where people believe the organisation must move; a small gap with poor performance suggests the problem lies elsewhere.
- Disagreement between groups is data. If leadership sees Clan and the front line sees Hierarchy, the culture conversation has to start with that split, whatever the averages say.
A worked example
Two merged estate agencies profile the culture clash behind their integration troubles
A regional estate agency group has been formed by merging a third-generation family firm of eight branches with a fast-growing challenger agency built on aggressive instruction targets and online marketing. A year in, staff turnover at the legacy branches has doubled and cross-selling between the two networks has barely started. The new managing director runs an OCAI-based profile across both legacy populations before finalising the integration plan.
- Clan
- Dominant in the family firm (38 points) and marginal in the challenger (12). Legacy staff cite loyalty, long service and 'the way we look after each other'; several named the founder's weekly branch visits as what they miss most since the merger.
- Adhocracy
- Weak on both sides (8 and 15 points). Neither business rewards experimentation. The challenger's growth came from executing a known playbook hard, and the family firm has changed little in a decade. Whoever expects the merged group to innovate its way out of portal dependence should note this.
- Hierarchy
- Secondary in the family firm (30 points): compliance-led sales progression, meticulous file audits, everything through the branch manager. The challenger scores 21 and treats process as a necessary evil. Friction over the group's new anti-money-laundering checks traces directly to this gap.
- Market
- Dominant in the challenger (52 points) and weak in the family firm (24). Valuers at the challenger track instruction league tables daily; legacy valuers found the new leaderboard 'humiliating' and two of the best have left. The preferred-culture profiles diverge most sharply here: challenger staff want more Market emphasis, legacy staff want markedly less.
The read. The profile shows a Clan-Hierarchy firm bolted to a Market firm, with almost no shared ground and no Adhocracy reserve to draw on. The averages disguise the real finding, which is that the two populations also disagree about where the group should go next. The integration plan changes as a result: a single group-wide target culture is deferred, the leaderboard is withdrawn from legacy branches for a year, and the group defines a modest shared profile, Market strengthened gently and Clan protected deliberately, with branch-level latitude. The diagnosis does not solve the clash, but it stops the MD treating turnover as a pay problem.
Pitfalls
- Profiling the whole organisation when the meaningful cultural units are divisions, sites or legacy firms. Aggregation hides exactly the differences the exercise exists to find.
- Treating the quadrants as good and bad. Every type has a failure mode and every type is an asset for some strategy; a strong Hierarchy score is a finding, never automatically a problem.
- Reading the profile as the culture itself. The CVF measures espoused perceptions; the deeper assumptions driving behaviour need Schein-style investigation to surface.
- Skipping the preferred-culture profile. The current profile alone invites description; the gap is what converts the exercise into an agenda.
- Letting the survey substitute for judgement. Point scores lend false precision; the conversation the profile provokes matters more than the numbers on the chart.
What the critics say
The framework's central claim, that the four types embody competing values in tension, has weak empirical support. A meta-analysis of studies using the CVF found the culture types correlate positively with one another rather than trading off, questioning the framework's core theoretical suppositions.
Hartnell, C. A., Ou, A. Y. and Kinicki, A. (2011) 'Organizational Culture and Organizational Effectiveness: A Meta-Analytic Investigation of the Competing Values Framework's Theoretical Suppositions', Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(4), pp. 677–694.
Independent psychometric validation of the OCAI is thinner than its ubiquity suggests. Cameron and Quinn's own validation was exploratory, and a later confirmatory study found acceptable structure and reliability for the four factors but only mixed support for the reciprocal opposition of quadrants that the model asserts.
Heritage, B., Pollock, C. and Roberts, L. (2014) 'Validation of the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument', PLOS ONE, 9(3), e92879.
The OCAI's ipsative scoring, dividing 100 points across the four types, forces the quadrants to compete arithmetically whether or not they compete in reality, and produces interdependent scores that violate the assumptions of standard statistical analysis. Dimensionality findings partly reflect the instrument's design rather than the culture being measured.
Discussed in Heritage, Pollock and Roberts (2014), PLOS ONE, and in the wider OCAI validation literature.
Work it through
Score or describe your organisation against each quadrant, current culture first and preferred culture second, then read the gaps. Your entries persist for this browser session and can be copied out as Markdown or printed.
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Sources and further reading
- Quinn, R. E. and Rohrbaugh, J. (1983) 'A Spatial Model of Effectiveness Criteria: Towards a Competing Values Approach to Organizational Analysis', Management Science, 29(3), pp. 363–377. ↗
- Cameron, K. S. and Quinn, R. E. (2011) Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture: Based on the Competing Values Framework. 3rd edn. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass. First published 1999.
- Hartnell, C. A., Ou, A. Y. and Kinicki, A. (2011) 'Organizational Culture and Organizational Effectiveness: A Meta-Analytic Investigation of the Competing Values Framework's Theoretical Suppositions', Journal of Applied Psychology, 96(4), pp. 677–694.
- Heritage, B., Pollock, C. and Roberts, L. (2014) 'Validation of the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument', PLOS ONE, 9(3), e92879. ↗