Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI)
OCAI maps an organisation's culture onto four types - Clan, Adhocracy, Market, Hierarchy - by asking people to score the current culture and the culture they'd want, so the gap between the two becomes visible and discussable.
Two axes cross to form four quadrants, each corner carrying one of the culture types and its score.
Reach for this when…
- Leadership talks about wanting more innovation but the actual culture rewards control and predictability.
- A merger is bringing two very different cultures together and nobody's named the difference yet.
- You want to change 'the culture' but that word means something different to everyone in the room.
How to run it
- Have people score six dimensions (dominant characteristics, leadership, management of people, organisational glue, strategic emphasis, criteria of success) across the four culture types, splitting 100 points each time.
- Score twice: once for the culture now, once for the culture you'd want in a few years.
- Average the scores and plot both profiles on the same four-quadrant map.
- Look at the gap between current and preferred, and where the split within the group is widest.
- Pick two or three specific behaviours to shift, not 'the whole culture' at once.
A worked example
Situation. Julio Cesar Reyes runs Reyes Precision, a small precision-parts manufacturer in Santiago, Dominican Republic, where leadership described the culture as innovative but engineers described it as rigid and rule-bound.
Applied. Running the OCAI across the leadership team and the shop floor showed leadership scoring the current culture as Adhocracy while the shop floor scored it firmly as Hierarchy, with almost no overlap.
Result. The gap itself became the conversation - Julio Cesar stopped pushing 'innovation' as a slogan and instead loosened two specific approval processes that engineers had actually named as the problem.
The catch
OCAI reduces culture to four boxes and six questions, a useful simplification but not the whole truth - subcultures between departments or sites get flattened into one average score, hiding exactly the kind of split that matters most. It also relies on honest self-report, and people describe the culture they'd like to believe in as often as the one that's actually there.
If the scores from the leadership team and the shop floor don't match, that gap is the real finding, not a measurement error to smooth over.
Origin: Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn