Development and Psychometric Properties of a Scale to Measure Hospital Organizational Culture for Cardiovascular Care

Background— Because organizational culture is increasingly understood as fundamental to achieving high performance in hospital and other healthcare settings, the ability to measure this nuanced concept empirically has gained importance. Aside from measures of patient safety culture, no measure of organizational culture has been widely endorsed in the medical literature, limiting replication of previous findings and broader use in interventional studies. Methods and Results— We sought to develop and assess the validity and reliability of a scale for assessing organizational culture in the context of hospitals’ efforts to reducing 30-day risk-standardized mortality after acute myocardial infarction. The 31-item scale was completed by 147 individuals representing 10 hospitals during August and September 2014. The resulting organizational culture scale demonstrated high level of construct validity and internal consistency. Factor analyses indicated that the 31 items loaded well (loading values 0.48–0.90), supporting distinguishable domains of (1) learning environment, (2) psychological safety, (3) commitment to the organization, (4) senior management support, and (5) time for improvement efforts. Cronbach &agr; coefficients were 0.94 for the scale and ranged from 0.77 to 0.88 for the subscales. The scale displayed reasonable convergent validity and statistically significant variability across hospitals, with hospital identity accounting for 11.3% of variance in culture scores across respondents. Conclusions— We developed and validated a relatively easy-to-administer survey that was able to detect substantial variability in organizational culture across different hospitals and may be useful in measuring hospital culture and evaluating changes in culture over time as part performance improvement efforts.