The Role of Mission, Organizational Culture, and Cultural Competency in Furthering the Development of Health Care Organizations: A Commentary

Abstract

We appreciate the editors' invitation to comment on these three papers, and we thank the authors for giving us so much food for thought. The papers linked together well conceptually. We can see an organization's mission necessitating cultural competency in service delivery and an organization's culture enhancing or hindering fulfillment of a mission or the commitment to cultural competency. In this commentary we will look at these papers from three different lenses – the nature of evidence, the role of normative admonitions in health care literature, and historical context – as a way to raise questions that link these papers to broader issues that affect health care research. Since we are commenting on the chapters “blind,” we cannot refer to the authors by name. For brevity's sake we will refer to the chapters as the Culture paper, the Mission paper, and the Competency paper.

Citation

Arndt, M. and Bigelow, B. (2011), "The Role of Mission, Organizational Culture, and Cultural Competency in Furthering the Development of Health Care Organizations: A Commentary", Wolf, J.A., Hanson, H., Moir, M.J., Friedman, L. and Savage, G.T. (Ed.) Organization Development in Healthcare: Conversations on Research and Strategies (Advances in Health Care Management, Vol. 10), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, Leeds, pp. 69-74. https://doi.org/10.1108/S1474-8231(2011)0000010010