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Cultural change that requires revision of taken-for-granted assumptions is necessitated to enact programmatic changes. However, such cultural change processes are challenging and time-consuming and therefore require continued support and resources. Data sensemaking is one important aspect of culture that local stakeholders often overlook. In this project, we study the change process enacted by local Departmental Action Teams (DATs) resulting from physics faculty members' participation in the Departmental Leadership Action Institutes (DALIs). This study followed two faculty change leaders from one physics program in their journey in DALI and their DAT over a year. This paper discusses preliminary interview results that help us understand how the DAT's microculture is situated within the dominant departmental culture, focused on the facet of data use. For example, we found that past data collection efforts were a primary responsibility of a single person and rarely became the focus of joint attention. Within the DAT, in contrast, a broad set of stakeholders engaged in joint data collection and sensemaking that informed decision making and led to revising initial assumptions about what programmatic changes might be needed in order to reach their goal.
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Constructing a comprehensive and adaptive survey for cultural analysis of engineering departments
ABSTRACT CONTEXT Culture influences the dynamics and outcomes of organizations in profound ways, including individual-level outcomes (like the quality of work products) and collective impacts (such as reputation or influence). As such, understanding organizational culture is a crucial element of understanding performance; from an anthropological perspective, ‘performance’ is not an outcome of culture, it is a part of culture. A key challenge in understanding organizational culture, especially in complex academic organizations, is the lack of a flexible, scalable approach for data collection and analysis. PURPOSE OR GOAL In this study, we report on our development of a survey-based cultural characterization tool that leverages both lightweight data collection from stakeholders in the organization and public information about that organization. We also integrate perspectives from prior literature about faculty, students, and staff in academic departments. Taken together, the resulting survey covers key elements of culture and allows for scalable data collection across settings via customizations and embedded logic in the survey itself. The outcome of this work is a design process for a new and promising tool for scalable cultural characterization, and we have deployed this tool across two institutions. APPROACH OR METHODOLOGY/METHODS We leverage prior research, our own preliminary data collection, and our experience with this approach in a different setting to develop a cultural characterization survey suitable for delivery to multiple engineering department stakeholders (faculty, staff, and students). We start with a modest number of interviews, stratified by these three groups and achieving saturation of responses, to understand their views on their organization, its strengths and weaknesses, and their perceptions of how it ‘works’. We merge this information with public data (for instance, departmental vision or mission statements, which convey a sense of priorities or values) as well as prior literature about higher education culture. We also draw upon our experience in another setting as well as pilot testing data, and the result is a carefully-constructed set of dichotomous items that are offered to department stakeholders in survey form using an electronic survey platform. We also collect background and demographic information in the survey. The resulting data are analyzed using Cultural Consensus Theory (CCT) to extract meaningful information about the departmental culture from the perspectives of the stakeholder groups. ACTUAL OR ANTICIPATED OUTCOMES The resulting survey consists of two parts, each with sub-components. The two top level survey parts contain: (i) items common to all respondents in all settings (i.e. all institutions in this study), and (ii) a set of institution-specific items. Within those sections, the framing of the items is calibrated for the stakeholder groups so that items make sense to them within the context of their experience. The survey has been administered, and the data are being analyzed and interpreted presently. We expect the results to capture the specific elements of local culture within these institutions, as well as differences in perspectives and experience among the three primary stakeholder groups. CONCLUSIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS/SUMMARY This study demonstrates a scalable approach to survey development for the purposes of cultural characterization, and its use across settings and with multiple stakeholder groups. This work enables a very nuanced view of culture within a department, and these results can be used within academic departments to enable discussion about change, priorities, performance, and the work environment.
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- Award ID(s):
- 1915574
- PAR ID:
- 10355863
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proceedings of REES AAEE 2021
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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