If you’ve ever been in an organization, you probably noticed a pervasive culture among the members. Organizational culture describes how employees perceive the characteristics of an organization. In other words, it’s a descriptive term. Research on organizational culture has sought to measure how employees see their organization: Does it encourage teamwork? Does it reward innovation? Does it stifle initiative?

In contrast, job satisfaction seeks to measure how employees feel about the organization’s expectations, reward practices, and the like. Although the two terms have overlapping characteristics, keep in mind that organizational culture is descriptive in that it describes an organization, much like how personality traits describe employees. On the other hand, job satisfaction is evaluative because it can be positive or negative.