Organizational culture and staff outcomes in services for people with intellectual disabilities.
The wider the gap between real and ideal workplace culture, the more stress, sick days, and turnover you will see.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Hatton et al. (1999) asked 450 disability-service staff to rate their real workplace culture and their ideal one. They then linked the gap to stress, sick days, and turnover.
The survey covered nine culture traits like clarity, support, and innovation.
What they found
Staff said their real workplace fell short of ideal on eight of the nine traits. Bigger gaps predicted more stress, more sick leave, and more quitting.
The pattern held across all job roles.
How this fits with other research
Kurz et al. (2014) later showed that staff psychological inflexibility, not just coping style, drives the stress-outcome link. This updates the 1999 model by naming a key inner process.
Dagnan et al. (2005) kept the stress focus but added a twist: high stress did not lead staff to blame clients more, contrary to classic attribution theory. The two studies look opposite until you see D et al. tested one-on-one reactions while C et al. looked at whole-culture gaps.
Griffith et al. (2012) closed the loop by showing that staff who do blame clients act more controlling. Together the papers trace a chain: culture gap → stress → attributions → interpersonal style.
Why it matters
You can’t fix stress with a pizza party. Measure the culture gap first. Run a short anonymous survey on clarity, support, and innovation. Share the results with staff. Pick one gap and write a 30-day action plan. Re-survey. This beats guessing why people keep calling in sick.
Want CEUs on This Topic?
The ABA Clubhouse has 60+ free CEUs — live every Wednesday. Ethics, supervision & clinical topics.
Join Free →Give your team a 9-item culture-gap survey and pick the biggest gap to fix this month.
02At a glance
03Original abstract
Organizational culture has been shown by organizational psychology to influence important aspects of staff behaviour. In particular, mismatches between staff perceptions of real and ideal organizational cultures have been shown to be associated with a range of negative outcomes for staff, such as stress, sickness and staff turnover. The present study investigates organizational culture in services for people with intellectual disabilities. The aim was to discover the prevalent organizational cultures in these services, and associations between organizational culture and staff outcomes. As part of a large-scale survey of staff in services for people with intellectual disabilities, information concerning organizational culture and staff outcomes was collected from 450 staff. A self-report measure of real and ideal organizational culture produced nine dimensions of organizational culture: (I) tolerant/staff-oriented; (2) achievement-oriented; (3) innovative; (4) analytical; (5) social relationships; (6) rewarding staff; (7) stable work environment; (8) demanding; and (9) conflict management. These nine dimensions of organizational culture showed generally adequate psychometric properties. While there was some variation in organizational culture across services, there is little variation across staff with different job titles. Overall, the staff rated real organizational cultures to be relatively high in achievement orientation and fostering social relationships, and relatively low in managing conflict and providing rewards for staff. Staff rated ideal organizational cultures to be high in rewarding staff, being tolerant/staff-oriented and fostering social relationships, and low in demands on staff. Except for the dimension of making demands on staff, where staff rated organizations as considerably higher than ideal, staff generally rated organizations as being less than ideal on all dimensions of organizational culture. Organizational psychology theory predicts that poor 'person-organization fit' (i.e. a greater mismatch between real and ideal organizational culture) will be associated with a range of negative staff outcomes. This theory was largely supported by findings of the present study. The implications for practice and for future research are discussed.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 1999 · doi:10.1046/j.1365-2788.1999.00190.x