The research that led to the development of the Denison Organizational Culture Survey was conducted by Dr. Denison over a 15-year period, studying 1000 organizations and 40,000 respondents. His findings were reported in the journals, Organizational Dynamics, and Organizational Science and published in the book, Corporate Culture and Organizational Effectiveness. *

In 1994, AVIAT and Dr. Denison got together to create a tool that would put this groundbreaking research to use. The output of that collaboration is the Denison Organizational Culture Survey, a sixty-question instrument that measures an organization's culture through the eyes of its employees, associates, or members.

Once in prototype form, with the reliability and validity testing completed*, AVIAT enlisted the help of fifty research partners - organizations that completed the survey and were willing to provide us with financial data. Once collected, we divided the research group in half, by their Return on Investment numbers. The top 25 organizations made up our "High-Performing Companies" group (Average ROI = 30%). The bottom 25 organizations made up our "Low-Performing Companies" group (Average ROI = 9%). Their composite results are shown below. (Obviously, the higher the scores - furthest extension from the center - the better the organizational culture.)

Financially Strong Companies

Financially Weak Companies

With this information supporting Dr. Denison's original research, we were confident that we could offer this survey to our clients and customers to help them in their organizational development efforts.

Further research has increased our understanding of how certain traits relate to various measures of organizational effectiveness.*

• Mission and Involvement correlated positively with Profitability/Return on Assets.
• Mission and Adaptability correlated positively with Sales/Revenue Growth and Market Share
• Adaptability and Involvement correlated positively with Product Development/Innovation
• Mission, Involvement, and Consistency correlated positively with Quality and Employee Satisfaction

These additional findings help organizations focus their change efforts on producing the results that are most important to them.