Center for Research and Development

Research Areas

With increasing customer expectations and decreasing resources being the norm for most businesses, organizations need “short cuts” – ways to effectively migrate more and more of their day-to-day operations to automatic pilot in order to navigate this sea of ever increasing demands. The Institute’s portfolio of validated diagnostic and assessment tools in combination with our advanced analytics capability provide leaders and managers with statistically reliable “short cuts.” The Center for Research and Development is committed to exploring topics that are related to organizational culture and increasing our understanding of how cultural processes actually work. This includes:

• Establishing cause-and-effect links between cultural norms and financial and non-financial performance

• Exploring the relationship between the level of trust in an organization and its financial and non-financial performance

• Exploring the relationship between an organization’s ways of working and its financial and non-financial performance

• Understanding the degree to which a high-level of uniformity in employees’ personality type positively or negatively affects an organization’s financial and non-financial performance

• Mapping out the nature and characteristics of cultural change in organizations, e.g. how it happens, how it’s derailed, the effect that failed change initiatives have on morale and the future ability of an organization to change

• Exploring the ways in which data from 360 degree reviews are actually reflections of the cultural norms (an organization’s “social mirror”) rather than measurements of individual performance

• Developing a quantitative-analytic approach to identifying Latent Organizational Weaknesses, with the goal of creating or strengthening the Safety Culture within an organization

As mentioned, the Center for Research and Development is committed to exploring topics that are related to organizational culture and increasing our understanding of how cultural processes actually work using both quantitative and qualitative data gathered with the Breckenridge Culture Indicator™ (BCI™). Many of our research topics are shaped and defined by the Breckenridge Equation™, as well as the theoretical model of organizational culture described in Mark Bodnarczuk’s book, Making Invisible Bureaucracy Visible: A Guide to Assessing and Changing Organizational Culture. The four terms of the Breckenridge Equation™ are shown below.

POI ↔ COI ↔ ROI = Current Results™

The Breckenridge Equation™ can be applied to organizations, of any size, in any industry, and in any country; regardless of their governance structure (for-profit, non-profit, government), the products and services provided, number of locations, or corporate life-cycle phase. The equation can be used to identify the root causes of organizational performance problems, and to help organizations improve performance at the organizational, work-group, and individual employee levels simultaneously. The key insight is that organizational culture is composed of all four terms in the equation, with each term being a distinct (but interdependent) category of business elements that interacts with the others to produce an organization’s financial and non-financial results. It’s the interaction of all four terms that creates and maintains organizational culture. The terms of the Breckenridge Equation™ are defined as follows:

• POI = Patterns-of-Interaction (Do, Informal Rules, Actions, Interactions, Group Learning)

• COI = Context-of-Interaction (Say, Formal Rules, Structures, Systems, Location)

• ROI = Repository-of-Interaction (See, Tacit Assumptions, Belief Structure, Values, Meaning, History)

• Current Results = (Get, Actual Results, Not Planned Results)

Here’s how the four terms work together to create and maintain culture in organizations. Day-to-day operations occur as patterns-of-interaction (POI) within the context-of-interaction of an organization’s structures and systems (COI). The interaction of POI and COI functions like a group-learning process that creates a repository-of-interaction (ROI) that becomes the shared knowledge-base, tacit beliefs, and unquestioned assumptions that managers and staff members have about the organization and the people in it. Over time, these first three elements settle down on a configuration of organizational patterns-of-interaction (POI) within the larger context-of-interaction of the external environment (COI), and the combination of the first three terms of the equation produces the Current Results; e.g., the financial and non-financial results that an organization actually gets.

If an organization is more or less successful at producing revenue and meeting the challenges of the external environment, the configuration of the terms in the Breckenridge Equation™ goes on autopilot, slips below the surface of organizational consciousness, and becomes “the way it’s done around here.” Over time, the specific configuration of the four terms reaches a state-of-equilibrium and solidifies within the context of the forces, pressures, and demands from the external environment. As Hanna puts it, “All organizations are perfectly designed to get the results they get! For better or worse, the system finds a way of balancing its operation to attain certain results.” When employees are hired into a new company, they are forced to compare their own ways of seeing the world that they developed while in former jobs with what goes on in the new organization, and to try and make sense of these new ways of working. Seasoned employees have internalized the organization’s ways of seeing and working long-ago, so these beliefs about how things are to be done (or not done) are on autopilot and powerfully shape the decisions they make. Employees that don’t (or can’t) internalize an organization’s way of seeing and ways of working don’t normally stay in that organization.

It is important to note that the Breckenridge Equation™ is a much broader definition of organizational culture than most theoretical models, which is especially important when conducting research on organizational culture. In fact, most organizational culture theorists focus on one or two of the terms in the equation to define what organizational culture is, but few systematically consider all four terms and their interdependency on one another. For example, Edgar Schein focuses primarily on tacit beliefs and assumptions (ROI) and the context (artifacts) in which they happen (COI); David Hanna focuses primarily on observable work habits and practices to explain how an organization’s culture really works – the interaction between POI and COI – as producing an organization’s Current Results; and John Kotter and James Heskett focus on linking Current Results to the level of flexibility in the POI as found in Theory I (Strong Cultures), Theory II (Strategically Appropriate Cultures), and Theory III (Adaptive Cultures).

Personality in Context^®