Link to Bottom Line

The Denison model and surveys were designed to link to important business outcomes such as profitability, customer satisfaction, return on equity, shareholder value, sales growth, innovation, employee satisfaction, and more. Denison surveys can help organizations and leaders understand how their regular activities impact bottom-line performance.

Here are some examples from our research group that demonstrate the relationship of the Denison model to various performance measures.

Return on Equity

Consider this example that compares the culture results for companies with low return on equity and high return on equity.

• Study of 161 publicly traded companies from a broad range of industries
• Contrasts the performance of the 10% of the organizations with the best culture scores with the 10% of the organizations with the worst culture scores.
• Average ROE for the organizations with the lowest culture scores is 6%. Average ROE for the organizations with highest culture scores is 21%.
• Highly similar results for return on total investment.

Return on Assets, Sales Growth, and Market Value

This example compares the return on assets, sales growth, and market-to-book ratio of companies with low and high culture results.

• Results are based on a study of 102 public companies from a broad range of industries surveyed by Denison Consulting from 1996-2004. Companies are primarily incorporated in the U.S. (87%).
• Dividing the firms into the top and bottom 25% based on DOCS overall shows stronger cultures outperform weaker cultures in the survey year on all three dimensions—profitability, sales growth, and market value.

Customer Satisfaction

In a separate study of 338 automotive dealerships, firms with stronger cultures have higher customer satisfaction ratings.