An evaluation of the relationship between Organisational Culture defined using The Competing Values Framework (1988) and Allen and Meyer’s (2000) Organisational Commitment types.
Introduction to culture
Organisational Culture is a topic that has been addressed by many theorists and defined in numerous different ways (Ostroff, Kinicki, & Tamkins 2003), with the most famous definition being “the way we do things around here” (M Bower 1966). However a more comprehensive, inclusive definition of culture would be: “the set of shared, taken-for-granted implicit assumptions that a group holds and that determines how it perceives, thinks about and reacts to its various environments” (Schein 1996). With this in mind, it is widely accepted that organisational culture not only has an impact on performance (Brown 2008; Andersen et al 2009) but has been described as one of the most powerful and stable forces operating in organizations (Lamond 2003).
The Competing Values Framework
This paper will use the Competing Values Framework (CVF, Figure 1) to address the aforementioned topic of corporate culture’s effect on organisational commitment, as it is regarded as the most popular approach for assessing the performance of a company (Gregory et al, 2009).

The model itself is comprised of two main axis, the first reflecting the dimensions of change and stability within an organizations’ culture. One end of this axis represents a prominence towards flexibility and spontaneity, whereas the other end denotes implications of focus on stability control and order (Burns & Stalker 1968). The other axis that is included to create this model represents the struggle of balancing the internal organisation and the external business environment. One end of this axis would imply a strong company focus on integration and buffering to protect and sustain the current organisation,