A Common Methodology: Using Cluster Analysis to Identify Organizational Culture across Two Workforce Datasets

1. Introduction

Organizational structures are comprised of an organizational culture created by the beliefs, values, traditions, policies and processes carried out by organizations. Work-life initiatives aim to encourage healthy employees through the provision of organizational programs, practices, and policies implemented to support employee work-life balance (Lobel, 1999; Pitt-Catsouphes, Matz-Costa, & MacDermid, 2007). Knowing more about how organizational culture influences the decisions of employees to use or not to use work-life initiatives and how organizational culture influences the impact of work-life initiatives on organizational performance will help bridge the gap across the work-life system.

“The work–life system includes three intersecting forces: individuals, organizations, and government, and three corresponding dimensions: work–life balance, work–life initiatives, and work–life policy. Each dimension in the work–life system has implications for workers, organizations, and government” (Munn, 2013, p. 403). The work-life system was conceptualized as part of two research studies, the NSCW Study and the NOS Study, which set out to identify the impact of organizational culture on the use and existence of work-life benefits (Munn, 2012, Munn, 2013).

In the NSCW Study it was hypothesized that an employee’s characteristics impact the use of work-life initiatives within a defined organizational culture. Similarly, in the NOS Study it was hypothesized that the existence of work-life initiatives impacts organizational performance within a defined organizational culture. Therefore, linking two of the forces of the work-life system - individuals and organizations (Munn, 2013) - both studies used a common methodology to first identify constructs of organizational culture available in the data and then to classify individuals (NSCW Study) and organizations (NOS Study) into homogenous groups (Munn, 2012).

There are some phenomena, such as employee behavior or organizational culture that can be “represented by a model in which there are distinct subgroups, types, or categories of individuals” (Collins & Lanza, 2013, Section 1.2, Para 1) or organizations. Each piece of the work-life system is influenced by the various cultures in which they exist. Understanding how the forces and dimensions of the work-life system interact within different organizational cultures can provide insight as to how work-life initiatives might be better provided and utilized (Munn, 2012).

To identify types of organizational culture in both the NSCW and the NOS Studies a cluster analysis (CA) was used to classify organizations. The result is a typology of organizational culture for each study, which can be used to answer the relevant research questions pertaining to the work-life system (see Table 5). The focus of this paper is to deconstruct the common methodology of CA used in both the NSCW and NOS Studies, discuss its pros and cons and identify other possible methodologies, such as latent class analysis which might also have been used to create a typology of organizational culture for this particular research (see Munn, 2012) as a means to understanding the place of organizational culture in work-life research.