Understanding organizational culture and its role in organization transformation and development

Why do identical attempts at implementing planned organizational change fail in one organization and succeed in another? This paper argues that understanding organizational culture is a prerequisite to implementing transformational change and development. Robert Quinn's competing values model is applied to a methodology for characterizing organizational culture. A case example is provided that shows how the model was used to characterize the organizational cultures of a major division of a large corporation and that of an important customer. The data were collected as part of a TQ "teaming" initiative.