Organizational culture and climate: Implications for services and interventions research

Efforts to disseminate and implement evidence-based practices (EBPs) in children's mental health service and other human service systems have had limited success. There is evidence that this limited success is in part a function of the characteristics of the human service organizations that provide the services. Human service organizations create a social context for the services they provide, and this context affects the quality and outcomes of the services in a variety of ways. A half century of research in a variety of organizations provides evidence that an organization's social context affects whether new core technologies (of which EBPs are an example) are adopted, how they are implemented, and whether they are sustained and effective. This article defines two dimensions of an organization's social context, climate and culture, that have been shown to be particularly important to human service quality and outcomes and reviews current organizational research to identify the potential mechanisms through which climate and culture influence the adoption and implementation of EBPs in mental health. A variety of organizational research methodologies are also suggested for integrating organizational culture and climate into services and intervention research.