Organizational Culture as a Need-Fulfillment System: Implications for Theory, Methods, and Practice

At the time of this writing, the business concept most vigorously championed by management consultants is the construct of organizational culture. Despite the tremendous attention focused on organizational culture, the concept lacks theoretical consensus among its proponents. Like the concepts of employee engagement and employee well-being, this field cries out for clearly stated definitions that embed the concept within a theoretical framework, allowing theory and measurement to productively develop. This paper argues for a more grounded approach to the concept of organizational culture, setting it within the psychological literature on human motivation. We review the leading definitions of organizational culture in the literature and find that they are reducible to a core set of human motives, each backed by full research traditions of their own, which populate a comprehensive model of twelve human motivations. We propose that there is substantial value in adopting a comprehensive motivational taxonomy over current approaches, which have the effect of "snowballing" ever more dimensions and elements. We consider the impact of setting the concepts of organizational culture within existing motivational constructs for each of the following: (a) theory, especially the development of culture frameworks and, particularly, how the concept of culture relates to the concepts of employee engagement and employee well-being; (b) methods, including the value of applying a comprehensive, structural approach; and (c) practice, where we emphasize the practical advantages of clear operational definitions.