In spite of the importance of organizational culture, scholarly advances in our understanding of the construct appear to have stagnated. We review the state of culture research and argue that the ongoing academic debates about what culture is and how to study it have resulted in a lack of unity and precision in defining and measuring culture. This ambiguity has constrained progress in both developing a coherent theory of organizational culture and accreting replicable and valid findings. To make progress we argue that future research should focus on conceptualizing and assessing organizational culture as the norms that characterize a group or organization that if widely shared and strongly held, act as a social control system to shape members’ attitudes and behaviors. We further argue that to accomplish this, researchers need to recognize that norms can be parsed into three distinct dimensions: (1) the content or what is deemed important (e.g., teamwork, accountability, innovation), (2) the consensus or how widely shared norms are held across people, and (3) the intensity of feelings about the importance of the norm (e.g., are people willing to sanction others). From this perspective we suggest how future research might be able to clarify some of the current conflicts and confusion that characterize the current state of the field.

尽管组织文化很重要，但我们对结构的了解在学术上似乎停滞不前。我们回顾了文化研究的现状，认为正在进行的关于什么是文化以及如何研究文化的学术辩论导致在定义和衡量文化方面缺乏统一性和准确性。这种歧义性限制了发展组织文化的连贯理论和积累可复制且有效的发现的进展。为了取得进展，我们认为，未来的研究应集中在概念化和评估组织文化上，作为规范团体或组织的规范，如果这些团体或组织得到广泛共享和强烈拥护，则可以作为塑造成员态度和行为的社会控制系统。我们进一步认为，要实现这一目标，内容或重要的内容（例如，团队合作，问责制，创新）；（2）共识或准则在整个人中的应用范围；以及（3）对准则重要性的感觉的强度（例如，人是愿意制裁他人）。从这个角度来看，我们建议未来的研究如何能够澄清一些当前冲突和混乱，这些冲突和混乱是该领域当前状态的特征。