Behind the Innovation: How We Created the Culture Assessment

Organizations today recognize that aligning candidates with company culture is just as vital as evaluating their skills and qualifications. In fact, research consistently shows that when employees’ values, behaviors, and working styles align with those of their organizations, it drives long-term engagement, productivity, and retention. Yet, many hiring teams struggle to assess cultural fit effectively.

This challenge led Prevue to create the Culture Assessment — a tool designed to bring clarity and structure to evaluating cultural alignment during hiring. In this article, we’ll explore the scientific foundation behind the assessment, the rigorous research that shaped its development, and how to incorporate it into your hiring practices.

What Is Prevue’s Culture Assessment?

Prevue’s Culture Assessment is a tool designed to measure person-organization fit by aligning candidate values with the culture of a workplace. Unlike traditional assessments that focus on job-specific skills and qualifications, this innovative solution emphasizes organizational values.

The assessment incorporates two key approaches: Culture Match and Culture Add. Culture Match focuses on finding candidates whose values align closely with the organization’s existing culture, fostering cohesion and reinforcing shared principles. By contrast, Culture Add recognizes the value of hiring individuals with different perspectives and values, bringing fresh ideas and challenging the status quo. This dual approach empowers organizations to shape their culture intentionally, whether by strengthening alignment around core values or embracing diverse thinking to drive growth.

Drawing from decades of research, including O’Reilly’s renowned Organizational Culture Profile (OCP)¹, the assessment evaluates 40 core values grouped into eight categories. These studies form the foundation for understanding how values influence workplace dynamics, team cohesion, and organizational success. By identifying and aligning these values, Prevue’s Culture Assessment provides a structured approach to translating culture into actionable insights.

The Foundation: Research & History of Culture

Assessing skills or job competencies is often straightforward, but organizational culture is inherently more complex and subjective, varying widely between organizations. Culture is shaped by the values that drive how individuals approach their roles, interact with others, and contribute to the workplace environment. Yet, accurately measuring these values can pose a significant challenge. It requires a deep understanding of the nuanced dynamics that define an organization and the ability to translate these complexities into practical strategies; thus, reflecting culture’s true impact on success.

Research from the 1990s, particularly work by O’Reilly et al.¹, marked a significant breakthrough in making culture more quantifiable. By focusing on work values, these studies provided a framework for understanding how values shape organizational culture and influence behavior. This approach turned culture from an abstract, intangible concept into a structured, actionable tool that could be used to improve workplace dynamics and organizational performance.

O’Reilly’s findings emphasized the importance of aligning individual and organizational values. This has been proven to predict critical outcomes such as job satisfaction, performance, and retention. Building on this foundation, Prevue applied these principles to the development of its Culture Assessment, creating a solution for evaluating and aligning organizational values to help teams succeed.

The Development Process: Building an Assessment

Developing the Culture Assessment was a multi-stage process grounded in research and psychometric expertise to ensure clarity, relevance, and scientific rigor.

Stage 1: Identifying the Pool of Work Values

To determine our values, we took from O’Reilly’s research, which analyzed 85 espoused values² from 554 organizations across the US and UK, and 54 core values from the OCP. Prevue’s I/O Psychologists refined this extensive list to a focused, modern set of 40 values. Outdated or redundant values were removed, while contemporary ones such as “remote or hybrid work” were added to reflect current workplace trends.

Stage 2: Creating Understandable Statements

To ensure comprehensiveness, each value was rephrased into short, clear statements. This step was essential to make the assessment intuitive for respondents, avoiding single-word descriptors (too vague) or lengthy explanations (too time-consuming). The result is a set of values presented in concise, straightforward language.

Stage 3: Categorizing the Values

The values were grouped into meaningful categories to provide actionable insights. With input from psychometric experts and conducting focus groups, the values were organized into eight categories, such as Innovation, Open Communication, Employee Wellbeing, and Competitiveness. These groupings allow organizations to identify specific cultural strengths and opportunities for alignment.

Stage 4: Evaluating for Social Desirability

Since certain cultural values can be more socially desirable than others, Prevue’s product team conducted extensive testing to account for potential bias. Using a diverse sample of 503 employed individuals from Prolific, each value was rated on a scale from 1 (very undesirable) to 5 (very desirable). These ratings helped rank values by social desirability and ensure a balanced assessment.

Stage 5: Designing the Assessment Format

To further minimize social desirability bias, Prevue uses a hybrid forced-choice and Q-sort methodology. Respondents are presented with sets of 10 values across four screens and asked to select:

  • 3 values that most describe their ideal or current organization.
  • 3 values that least describe their ideal or current organization.

Across the 40 values, respondents select 12 that most describe, 16 that are neutral, and 12 that least describe the organization. This forced distribution creates a clear and nuanced cultural profile, ensuring a balanced and unbiased reflection of organizational culture.

How Our Culture Assessment Works

Understanding and aligning organizational culture requires a holistic view, capturing perspectives from both leadership and employees. Prevue’s Culture Assessment offers a unique approach by generating profiles that reveal core cultural competencies, creating clarity and actionable insights for leadership teams.

Leadership vs. Employee Culture Profiles

The assessment begins by generating a culture profile that represents the organization’s core values. This profile becomes a benchmark to compare candidates against during the hiring process, ensuring new hires align with the company’s culture.

Prevue’s Culture Assessment is designed to go a step further by capturing distinct perspectives — those of the leadership team and the employees.

The Leadership Profile reflects the leadership team’s perception of the organization’s culture. This can often result as ‘aspirational’, representing the values and culture that leaders want to cultivate. While these insights are vital for guiding the organization’s vision, they may not always be the experiences of employees. The Employee Profile, on the other hand, captures the actual workplace culture as experienced by the people who embody it daily. This profile highlights the real-world dynamics that influence collaboration, engagement, and performance.

By comparing these two profiles, organizations can uncover gaps between leadership’s vision and employees’ reality. These insights are invaluable for aligning aspirations with experiences, addressing disconnects, and creating a cohesive and authentic culture that everyone can embrace.

Understanding Both Perspectives

Cultural misalignment is more common than leaders might think. Leadership often underestimates or misinterprets the cultural experience of employees, leading to disengagement, turnover, and lost productivity. For example, while leadership might prioritize innovation, employees may feel their work environment discourages risk-taking.

Prevue’s Culture Assessment helps bridge this gap by providing a shared understanding of what the culture is and what it should be. Leaders gain clarity on how their vision aligns (or doesn’t) with employee experiences, enabling them to make informed adjustments. Employees, in turn, feel seen and valued, fostering trust, collaboration, and loyalty.

The ultimate goal is to create a unified culture profile that combines leadership team insights and the lived experiences of employees. When these perspectives align, organizations can cultivate a workplace where everyone is engaged, productive, and contributing to shared values.

Discover the Power of Cultural Alignment

Creating a workplace culture that aligns leadership’s vision with employees’ experiences is essential for driving engagement, productivity, and long-term success. Prevue’s Culture Assessment offers a powerful way to help organizations uncover and bridge cultural gaps, ensuring every hire contributes to a cohesive and successful team.

Ready to transform your hiring process? Discover how Prevue’s Culture Assessment can help you evaluate cultural alignment and build a stronger organization today.

 

This article was written in collaboration with Baila Glogauer, M.S., I/O Psychologist and Dr. Chet Robie, Ph.D., I/O Psychologist. 
¹O’Reilly, C. A., Chatman, J., & Caldwell, D. F. (1991). People and organizational culture: A profile comparison approach to assessing person-organization fit. Academy of Management Journal, 34(3), 487–516.
² Bourne, H., Jenkins, M., & Parry, E. (2019). Mapping espoused organizational values. Journal of Business Ethics, 159(1), 133–148