A Study on the Relationships between Cultural Profiles and Performances in Hospital Organizations : An Empirical Test of Competing Values Model on the Korean Hospital Organizations

병원조직에 있어서 간호사들이 지각하는 조직문화 프로필과 성과와의 관계에 관한 연구 - 병원조직을 대상으로 한 경청가치 모형의 경험적 검증 -

As the environment related to hospital operation has changed very competitively in recent years, a need to reform the hospital management is ever growing. For that reason, it has become more urgent and strategically important for us to diagnose the organizational culture of the hospitals and to make efforts to change them towards more performance- and customers-oriented one. So far, there have been many studies done on the hospital organizations. However, this research distinctively attempts to base itself on the competing values approach in studying the organizational culture and empirically examine how different profiles of the organizational culture may have an impact on the organizational performances in hospital organizations. The results of this study has showed several interesting findings and posed the discussions to be dealt with. First, most hospitals selected for this research are characterized by the inner-oriented culture with more focused on 'hierarchy' and 'relationship-oriented' culture rather than on 'reform' and 'work-oriented' one. And the strong 'hierarchy-oriented' culture is a very general phenomenon in the sample hospitals. From these findings, we can inference that despite the recent efforts of most Korean hospitals for organizational change and innovation they still have long distance way to go. In addition, another important implications of this research has come from the analysis of the relationships between the cultural profiles and organizational performances. For this purpose, this research has conducted a series of cluster analysis and identified four distinct cultural profiles from the sample organizations. Several major findings are as follows. First, with respect to the dependent variable of 'job satisfaction' perceived by the nurses working in the sample hospitals, we found that the balance of competing organizational values had more positive impact on the job satisfaction. This result confirms the hypothesis of competing values model on the organizational performances. However, such result was not replicated on the other dependent variable, 'patients' satisfaction'. The reasons for these results and other discussions including the limitations of this study are suggested.