Denison Organizational Culture Survey Overview of 2013 Normative Database

Transcription

1 Denison Organizational Culture Survey Overview of 2013 Normative Database December 2013

2 Executive Summary As part of Denison Consulting s continuing effort to provide accurate and relevant benchmarking information, we periodically review the Denison Organizational Culture Survey (DOCS) normative database. This document describes the 2013 Normative Database, summarizes the organizations currently included in the benchmark database, and highlights changes from the previous iteration of the database. Highlights include: 1,084 organizations are included in the normative database (previously 931). A wide variety of industries are represented including manufacturing, professional services, financial services, health care, educational institutions, government, and non-profit. The benchmarks are stable across years. Purpose of the Normative Database The normative database provides clients with information about how their organization scored on the DOCS relative to other organizations. An external benchmark is useful because it provides additional information about what a score means beyond what is conveyed by the average score (e.g., the mean). Scores in the normative database are provided in the form of percentiles, which indicate the percent of organizations in the database that scored the same or lower than the target organization on a given item or index. There are a number of advantages to using percentiles over average scores. For one, creating percentiles standardizes results by putting all items and indexes onto the same scale. Means and standard deviations for the DOCS items differ substantially. On some items, a typical mean for an organization might be 3.20, whereas for another item it might be As a result, means for different items are usually not directly comparable. After converting raw scores to percentiles, all items and indexes have average percentiles of 50. Expressing results as percentiles puts all the items and indexes in the same metric, which allows one item or index to be compared with another. The second advantage offered by percentiles is that percentiles answer the is that good or bad question. For example, if an organization receives a score of 3.31 on a 5-point scale for the Core Values index they might feel that the result is favorable since a rating of 3.31 is closer to 5 than to 1. However, without knowing what percentile a score of 3.31 translates to can leave the interpretation of this result ambiguous. If a 3.31 falls at the 19 th percentile, then an organization receiving that score would know that they are very weak at promoting their Core Values. This means that the organization s Core Values rating actually indicates an important development opportunity, which could have been overlooked had the organization merely focused on the average ratings. 2

3 Description of the DOCS Normative Database The 2013 DOCS norms are based on 1,084 organizations as rated by over 480,000 total respondents. Every organization included is rated by at least 6 respondents and as many as 44,000 respondents. On average, organizations in the benchmark were rated by about 450 employees. Regardless of the number of respondents, however, each individual organization is weighted equally in the norms. In other words, an organization that surveys 3,000 people does not have a larger influence on the benchmark than an organization that surveys 300. A major decision in this update was to remove our ten-year time band. Specifically, this database contains data from 2000 through The following decision rules were used in determining which organizations should be included in the normative database: DOCS ratings were obtained from at least 25 respondents for public companies and at least 6 1 respondents for private companies and non-profit organizations. All ratings were provided within a 6 month span. Industry and geographical information were available for the organization. Data was a census or a representative sample of an entire organization and included respondents from all functional units or departments. 1 A minimum sample of 6 was chosen to ensure that the data is reflective of an organization as a whole and not a sub-set of one department. It is reasonable to expect that small, private organizations may have as few as 6 people. 3

4 Industry and Geographical Breakdowns The DOCS database contains organizations representing a wide variety of industries and countries, from architectural firms to zoological gardens, and from Algeria to Ukraine. There are 40 Fortune 500 companies (as of July 2013) listed in this database. Also, 291 organizations in the database are multinational. The industry demographics for the 2013 norms were classified via the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). Using the NAICS classification system allows for more granularity and description to be provided about the organizations that make up the 2013 norms. Top industries in the benchmark include professional, scientific, and technical service firms, finance and insurance services firms, and retail or wholesale firms. A complete breakdown of industry representation in the DOCS database is provided in Figure 1. Figure 1. Distribution of Organizations by Industry NOTE: Accom & Food Srvcs = Accommodation & Food Services; Mfg = Manufacturing; Srvcs = Services; NGO = Non- Governmental Organization; Prof/Sci/Tech = Professional, Science, and Technical Services. 4

5 Geographically, approximately 68% (736) of organizations in the database were headquartered in the United States. Other than the United States, the best-represented countries include the United Kingdom (59), Canada (47), China (24), Australia (23), Colombia (16), the Netherlands (16), Switzerland (16), and Germany (15). See Figure 2 and Figure 3 for distribution by region Approximately 42% (n=192,293) of the survey respondents were located outside of the U.S. However, there has been an increase of international survey respondents in recent years. Within the last 5 years, ~60% of all respondents surveyed were located outside the U.S. The normative database contains data from the DOCS in 35 languages. The top 5 languages selected, aside from English, were Latin American Spanish, Chinese Simplified, German, Malay, and Japanese. Figure 2. Distribution of Organizations by Region North America 72.2 Europe 15.1 Asia / Pacific 4.2 Central / South America 3.1 Australia / Oceania 2.8 Africa / Middle East 2.5 Percent Figure 3. Distribution of Respondents by Region North America 57.7 Europe 13.0 Asia / Pacific 7.7 Central / South America Middle East/Africa Australia / Oceania Percent NOTE: Approximately 45,000 surveys that did not contain region data were excluded from this graph. 5

6 Comparison Between 2011 and 2013 Normative Databases Unlike the 2011 version of the DOCS normative database, the 2013 version of the DOCS normative database does not include a 10 year time band. Despite this, differences in the results obtained using the two versions of norms are relatively minor. In terms of average ratings of DOCS items, the organizations included in the 2011 and 2013 normative databases are similar. In general, scores from 2013 appear slightly higher than scores from Most changes were small, with the largest mean difference equal to Results indicate that at the lower end of the norm distribution (5 th and 20 th percentiles) organizations may see a very slight difference, if any, in scores. Toward the upper-half of the distribution (50 th, 80 th, and 95 th percentiles) it is likely, though very minimally, the case that the same organization would see a decrease in their score relative to 2011 norms. The score needed to achieve a certain percentile with 2011 norms would produce a percentile score with 2013 norms that was lower by an average of 1 percentile point. Overall, these results suggest that the 2013 norms provide slightly more challenging benchmarks for organizations (see Figure 4). Figure 4. Overall trend of percentile shifts from 2011 to 2013 norms 1 Percentile Shift Percentile