This study seeks to enhance our understanding of the role of organizational culture in facilitating innovation in nonprofit organizations. Specifically, it examines the relationship between cultural consensus (degree to which employees share organizational values), organizational values (the content of consensus), and the structure of organizational culture and organizational innovativeness.
The first phase of the study will involve testing and validation of the proposed model in a nonprofit organization called Communities in Schools, which operates through 48 programs in Georgia. Data will be collected using a variety of techniques: semi-structured interviews, surveys, and organizational documents. After testing and validating the model, the second phase of the study will include data collection in a larger sample of Communities in Schools organizations in the states of North Carolina (27 sites), Florida (17 sites), and South Carolina (30 sites).
The study will have important theoretical, methodological, and practical implications. It will improve innovation models by incorporating organizational culture into the conceptual model. By applying innovative theoretical and methodological tools from the field of cognitive anthropology, the study will address some of the conceptual and methodological issues plaguing innovation and culture research. Finally, while the findings of this study will have implications for all types of organizations - nonprofit, business, and public - they will be especially relevant for nonprofit organizations partnering with school systems. Having knowledge of how organizational culture affects innovativeness of an organization will help not only organizational managers, but also school administrators to identify the ways in which culture needs to change in order to foster innovation, and to design managerial practices for influencing and modifying organizational culture.
