Organizational Culture Inventory
July 21, 2005I just filled out an Organizational Culture Inventory (OCI), which is kinda like the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) only not as comprehensive.
I had to take the MMPI back when I was applying for a co-op job at the NSA. It’s not specific to NSA–they give this test to everybody who applies for a security clearance at any government agency. The MMPI is long and thorough–I figured I must have answered a couple hundred questions or more on that thing. The OCI is shorter–maybe a hundred items total.
But the goals are basically the same–try to get at your beliefs by repeatedly asking the same question in slightly different ways. For example on the MMPI they had dozens of questions around the theme of killing somebody–do you ever fantasize about killing your friends? Your Mom? A stranger you just met? But they don’t ask the questions all at once since that would be too obvious. The questions within a thematic group are physically scattered throughout the test booklet. The hope I guess is that a psychopath might remember to lie one or two times but eventually they would trip somewhere among the dozen different ways that the same question gets asked.
So this OCI is the same thing but trying to get at your impressions of the corporate culture. But whereas the MMPI is focused on the individual, for the OCI everyone’s responses get averaged together to draw a picture of the corporate culture.. For example, there were several questions related to the theme of how co-workers are treated. Are you encouraged to give positive feedback? Do you feel everyone has to go along to get along? Etcetera and so on–the same question asked multiple ways. So even though the OCI was maybe a hundred questions total, thematically I think there were maybe a dozen real questions embedded in there.
I’m not certain how well either of these assessments really does at capturing the personality or the culture. The MMPI is something of a standard and has been around for years, so presumably it has done very well as a predictive tool for weeding out people. The OCI I’ve never seen until the last year so I don’t have any feel for whether it’s any good at what it claims to do.
We’ll see I guess when the results come back. I’ll let you know how it does at capturing the corporate culture.
TrackBack URI