Culture and Climate 1: Investigating Aspects of Organizational and Care Culture by the Use of Proverbs

Abstract

The study was part of a larger project concerning the relationships between culture, climate and the experiences of nursing personnel and patients in different care settings. In the first phase of the project, methods and instruments for studying the central variables were developed and tested, and preliminary relationships between variables were investigated. The purpose of this part of the study was to investigate aspects of organizational and care culture by developing and pre-testing an instrument. The instrument, the Proverb Scale, consisted of two parts. The first part was a Likert type scale consisting of 60 proverbs. In the second part the respondents were asked to choose five proverbs that best described their work unit. The study was conducted at an administrative unit at a health care college and at a geriatric hospital. The results showed many similarities between the two samples with respect to the Likert scale part of the instrument. There were more differences between the samples with respect to the five best descriptions. In the sample consisting of administrators there were more differences between the Likert part and the best description part than in sample consisting of geriatric nursing personnel. Many of the proverbs were not understood by the respondents. The conclusions were that the Proverb Scale is worth developing further. However, it has to be condensed, the instructions need further considerations, and it needs further validating in larger samples from different types of contexts.