Organizational cultures of libraries as a strategic resource

While testing the value of the competing values framework in public, not-for-profit university setting, Berrio (1999) sought to understand the best way to achieve Senge's (1990) goal of becoming an effective learning organization. (1) He found that to become a more effective and efficient learning organization the organization as a whole also needed to develop a stronger clan culture. The clan culture values would provide a more supportive environment for innovation and risk taking in a traditionally stable, non-risk-taking environment. One might hypothesize that a library would need to be more market oriented, but this might not be the case. This again supports the value of understanding the key characteristics, strengths, and weaknesses of libraries' existing cultures if they are to adapt and succeed in today's more volatile environment.

One example of the benefits of cultural understanding for libraries is found in a study by Varner (1996). Varner used the CVF to diagnose the culture of an academic library as a means of understanding how new action strategies could be developed. A questionnaire based on the competing values framework was used to survey staff and faculty, thereby providing a profile of the library's overall organizational culture and its subcultures. One of the advantages was that using the CVF provided the library with insights into their operations in a way that was not focused on deficiencies or problems. Rather, the library found that the results provided opportunities for dialogue around current strategies, changes in their environment, and how new approaches might compete with existing ones but could produce positive new directions.

Buenger, Daft, Conlon, and Austin (1996) found that an organization's value set is particularly predictable based on contextual values, meaning that value sets differ from unit to unit. Certain patterns of values appear to exist within particular environmental and technological contexts, and these values further influence how an organization is structured. With the emerging challenges of new technology and increased private competition, as well as new structural forms such as digital libraries, libraries are not only facing increasingly dynamic contextual influences on their cultural values, but these values may be in conflict with the traditional structures. While one interpretation is an increase in cultural conflict, an alternative view, based on application of the competing values framework, found that all four of the cultural types could coexist among different groups within an organization. As an example, in a study of 141 randomly selected companies, firms tended to have a mix of two to four of the cultural types (Al-Khalifa & Aspinwall, 2001). This raises the question of differentiation or fragmentation of library cultures and an increased need to manage potentially competing cultural value sets if libraries are to retain professionally diverse and skilled staff and still meet the needs of their constituents.