Cultural Studies

Mission-Centered Solutions has funded and conducted research on organizational culture. The largest of these studies is the Crewmember Attitudes Questionnaire (CAQ) survey that measures organizational culture - specifically attitudes that relate to communication, coordination, leadership, and organizational effectiveness.

From 1997 until 2004, MCS used the CAQ with more than 5000 fire crew leaders in the federal wildland fire industry in an effort to measure long-term shifts in organizational culture and to detect problem areas that could impact training effectiveness. Data collected from this survey has enabled MCS to establish a baseline and map trends.

The findings, authored by Lark McDonald and Dr. Larry Shadow, Precursor for Error: An Analysis of Wildland Fire Crew Leaders' Attitudes about Organizational Culture and Safety (PDF), provides an overview of Phase I of this study, describing weak areas in an otherwise strong culture.

This paper was presented at the Australasian Fire Authorities Council International Fire (AFAC) Conference in 2003. A follow-up paper related to this study was presented at the IAWF Human Factors Conference in 2005. The findings from the study were also used by the national safety offices of the U.S. wildland firefighting agencies to improve the effectiveness of ground safety.

In the future, MCS will administer the CAQ to measure the results of organizational change initiatives and training. 

The survey is derived from the Cockpit Management Attitudes Questionnaire (CMAQ) and Flight Management Attitudes Questionnaire (FMAQ 2.1) developed by the NASA/UT/FAA Aerospace Crew Research Project in 1994. Widely employed in aviation, the CMAQ has been used with more than 30,000 aviation and medical personnel in the U.S. and throughout the world. Click here for more detailed information about the CAQ and its origins.

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