A glance into organizational culture, ethical workplace climate, and employee engagement levels in a health organization unit

Employee engagement has become an important measure of employee performance and it has been linked to higher overall firm performance outcomes. Studies have shown that employee engagement may be impacted by both organizational culture and ethical workplace climate. For example, organizational culture is deep rooted and depending on the cultural dimensions most highly emphasized within a company, may have positive or negative impacts on employee performance indicators such as employee engagement. Whereas culture is deep rooted and does not easily change, climate is more fluid and can ebb and flow with different instances on-going within the organization. In addition, researchers have come to understand that workplace climate can be impacted relating to ethical issues and a measure of ethical workplace climate (EWC) has emerged to measure perceptions of employees relating to EWC. However, most studies only look at culture or climate, but not the two together, or specifically with employee engagement. This study examines employee perceptions of culture, ethical workplace climate, and employee engagement in a case study with employees in health care. The study findings show that the positive culture type and climate type identified can be associated with positive levels of employee engagement. Specifically, employees perceived a clan culture type to have an overall positive impact employee engagement. Findings about employee perceived climate type indicate that employees perceive a social climate type is associated with a positive link to higher employee engagement levels. In addition, employee perceived engagement within the department measured moderately positive, consistent with its relationship with the perceived dominant and subordinate culture and climate type influences