Culture is unique for every organization and it’s about “everything”: performance, competitiveness, innovation, satisfaction, retention, resistance to organizational change…

Marcella Bremer is the co-founder of OCAI online. She uses the Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI – © 1999 Kim S. Cameron) to get a quick overview of the current and preferred culture and to help organizations develop or change.

The OCAI is a validated tool, based on the Competing Values Framework. Dr. Kim S. Cameron is the author and owner of the OCAI. It’s been used by over 10,000 companies worldwide.

Students can do a free trial of the OCAI survey. This takes around 15 minutes to complete and is immediately accessible. The paid version is available in 19 languages.

The Competing Values Framework (CVF) is one of the forty most important frameworks used in business (ten Have et.al., 2003) and tested for over thirty years in organizations. It is the most used framework for assessing organizational culture and dynamics.

The CVF is validated by a ton of research (Denison, 1990; Howard, 1998; Deshpande & Farley, 2004), and identifies the underlying dimensions of organizing that exist in almost all human and organizational activity. It aligns with the four biological determined drives in the brain: the need to bond, to learn, to acquire, and to defend. (Paul Lawrence, Nitin Nohria, 2002) and with other dimensions of human behavior (Linnenluecke, 2010; Ralston, Tong, Terpstra, Wang & Egri, 2006; Cameron & Quinn, 2006).

You can read more about its research basis

The Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument

The OCAI (© 1999 Kim S. Cameron) maps your culture on a grid with four archetypes of culture:

  • the dynamic, entrepreneurial Create Culture
  • the friendly, people-oriented Collaborate Culture
  • the structured, process-oriented Control Culture
  • the competitive, results-oriented Compete Culture
Competing Values Framework

Praise for the OCAI

Provided by OCAI online

What can

OCAI Online do for you?

We offer a free trial for students to learn more. For teams and organizations we offer paid online culture survey packages, ready to use from our website: OCAI Pro or OCAI Enterprise.

The difference between Pro and Enterprise assessments is simple: the Pro provides one collective overall profile of all participants. The Enterprise allows multiple sub-profiles of your choice to compare departments or levels.

From the Product page you can find additional products and services, such as my Organizational Culture Change book, the Culture Change Leadership workshop, and the Culture Change online Video Training.

The book and training teach successful culture change with a framework of 7 steps: from OCAI assessment to a quantified, visual profile to adding qualitative examples, raising engagement and awareness, assessing the future, understanding the preferred culture down to the levels of daily behaviors and outcomes, and finally to a change plan that people take ownership of because they co-created it.

You can download the survey set-up manuals and sample reports.