Methodology and philosophy

CultureQuery is built around real teams, scanned repeatedly over time, not a one-off survey. A team runs one scan a month at minimum for the first four months of an engagement, each one followed by a live workshop working through the results with the group. After that initial four months, most teams shift to a lighter cadence: quarterly, or twice a year, depending on what the team needs.

An engagement can be run with a single team or with multiple teams across an organization. Coaching is delivered by one or two coaches per engagement, working the room together rather than one person carrying the whole session. The scan itself is built for an intact team of five to twenty people; below five, individual results are withheld entirely (see the privacy section below).

It isn't just the team that's being coached. The team lead gets their own one-on-one coaching alongside the team scans, a separate thread running the same four months, focused on what the results mean for how they lead and what they need to change to make it stick. The team scan shows what's true. The leadership coaching is where that turns into different behavior, not just a shared chart everyone nods at once and forgets.

Every question in this scan comes from a published, peer-reviewed research instrument. None of it was invented for this tool.

The seven psychological safety questions are Amy Edmondson's Team Psychological Safety scale, introduced in her 1999 paper "Psychological Safety and Learning Behavior in Work Teams" (Administrative Science Quarterly). It is one of the most widely used and independently validated instruments in organizational research, the same construct behind Google's internal research on what separates high-performing teams from the rest. It covers five underlying facets: whether mistakes get held against people, whether people can be vulnerable and ask for help, whether people get excluded for being different, whether people feel safe taking a risk, and whether people's specific skills are actually used and valued.

The eight intrinsic motivation questions are adapted from two related, well-established sources: the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory, built on Deci and Ryan's Self-Determination Theory, and the Multidimensional Work Motivation Scale (Gagné et al., 2015, European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology). Together they cover four facets, two questions each, deliberately structured so each pair captures a genuinely different angle rather than restating the same idea twice: autonomy (do people have real choice, or are they just complying), competence (do people feel capable, or are they struggling quietly), relatedness (do people feel connected to this team specifically), and enjoyment (is the work itself satisfying, separate from the outcome).

Two dimensions, fifteen questions, all sourced, none invented. Nothing here is proprietary methodology dressed up to sound scientific. It's published research, used as it was designed to be used.

Most honest answers aren't a clean five options. A slider lets someone land where they actually are, including the in-between spots a Likert scale forces people to round away.

Results stay sealed until every person invited to a scan has answered. Partial results could reveal who has not responded yet, or let one person's answers be inferred from what changed when they submitted.

Individual scores are withheld entirely on teams with fewer than five respondents. In a small group, a single dot can be traced back to a person, so only the team average is shown.

No identity is ever linked to an answer. Links are one-time and anonymous, and the coach only ever sees whether a link has been used, never how it was answered.

The results sit on a continuous field: psychological safety on one axis, intrinsic motivation on the other, with the four familiar descriptions blending into each other rather than being separated by hard lines.

That is deliberate. A boundary drawn at the midpoint would tell a team sitting at 49 that they are something categorically different from a team sitting at 51, which is not true and is not useful. Names like Flow or Fear are here as language for a conversation, not as verdicts. What matters is where the team sits, how far apart its people are from each other, and what that opens up to talk about.

The questions are academic and the platform is software, but the practice underneath both is older than either: look at what is actually there before deciding whether it is good or bad. More about the coach behind this.