(Illustration by Raymond Biesinger)
Organizational culture is central to the performance of any organization. It reflects how employees act and interact, how they rise to challenges and respond to change, and how the organization as a whole represents itself to stakeholders, be they prospective employees, partners, customers, or communities. It is composed of the beliefs held by an organization’s members, and, vitally, the actions that are guided by and sustain these beliefs.
Despite its importance, culture as a topic of discussion often elicits trepidation when managers and leaders confront changing or cultivating it in order to improve their workplace. This happens in part because culture presents as a mysterious facet of organizational life—essential to how an organization functions, but hard to guide or change. As an invisible force permeating an organization, culture surreptitiously patterns people’s actions yet is not easily governed, because its essence is more holistic and felt than divisible and manipulable.
Yet employees often know a great deal about how to navigate their organization’s culture and are very savvy at using aspects of it to introduce new issues or to generate fundamental change. For example, our prior research on this topic revealed how employees at an athletic-apparel company incorporated a concern about sustainability into the work of designers and marketers, despite the fact that their early efforts were likened by some employees to “turning around the Titanic” in an organizational culture strongly oriented toward innovation for athletic performance. Through a series of careful interventions that demonstrated the potential for sustainability criteria to connect with the commitment to innovation, these employees successfully instigated a significant internal shift. In this way, sustainability became an integral part of the company’s understanding of innovation. This example demonstrates that change can occur when aspects of a culture are reoriented toward new employee or societal concerns. Rather than attempting to fundamentally shift the culture, employees led their peers to see and use a fundamental aspect of their culture—innovation—in a new way that met societal needs for more sustainable products.
In an effort to acknowledge culture’s pervasiveness and fluidity, management and organizational scholars are now regarding organizational culture as composed of an open, varied, and malleable “toolkit” of resources. This trend represents a significant shift from how it has been described in the past—as an internal code that leaders establish and that becomes entrenched over time. In this article, we draw on recent developments in organization studies to explore how these new insights signal the democratization of organizational culture and suggest that actions and behaviors that constitute an organization’s culture are accessible to any member of an organization.
Understanding this new perspective can help people across organizational levels better tune in to, navigate, and direct their cultures to be more responsive to their organization’s evolving needs and opportunities—including societal demands to become more inclusive, diverse, or flexible. Furthermore, employees can utilize valued aspects of their organization’s culture to help their organization better address society’s needs. As experts in organization studies, we illustrate these levers for change by drawing on cases based on our own and others’ research. First, we outline why organizational culture matters to organizations and their stakeholders. Then we explore and reframe common myths about organizational culture in order to show how our understandings of what it is and how it is managed have shifted significantly, opening new opportunities for people to generate change.
Why Culture?
Our understanding of culture has come a long way since the 1980s heyday of the concept of organizational culture, when penning a song or establishing rituals was purported to unlock superior performance. Some may recall how Herb Kelleher, founder and CEO of Southwest Airlines, dressed up as Elvis Presley for company meetings or hosted company parties featuring skits and songs to illustrate his company’s culture—one founded on the idea that letting people be themselves and have fun at work led to better customer service and morale. But citing these overt displays as the secrets to Southwest’s being the only consistently profitable US airline is shortsighted. Along with a commitment to high-quality customer service, but with no frills (no seat assignments, snacks, or blankets, even when these were standard on other airlines), Southwest operated a more modern, more fuel-efficient fleet than any of its competitors; flew to less expensive, secondary airports; and served a small number of routes with high frequency enabled by employees’ willingness to work across specializations to keep to an aggressive schedule. Southwest’s lean operations—not just a culture of fun—were what made it a top performer in the industry.
We now know that efforts to engineer a certain kind of culture—for example, one that is open and flexible and celebrates individual autonomy—through messages and rituals can fall flat and produce, for at least some employees, cynicism and burnout. Despite moving away from the unchecked optimism that culture is a silver bullet for superior performance, we still recognize a number of distinct benefits for organizations that flow from culture.
First, organizational culture produces cohesion when employees internalize commitments and align expectations about how they relate to each other and how they orient to the organization’s overall goals. In fact, leaders have long recognized culture as a substitute for more direct managerial control through, say, standard operating procedures and surveillance. Many nonprofits, for example, benefit from employees’ commitment to “doing good” through advocacy work, which leads to high levels of engagement and contribution and fosters an experience of being a part of a family.
Cultural cohesion need not imply mindless conformity, however. Certain commitments—like innovative consumer-goods company 3M’s guideline that employees spend up to 15 percent of their time on nonwork tasks—can underpin creativity and divergent thinking, inspiring novel product ideas or improved organizational processes. The flip side of cohesion, of course, is when it produces a “dark side,” or associated negative consequences. Some stakeholders blame nonprofits’ commitments to causes for their inattention to accountability, which can contribute to abuse of power, as in the case of Oxfam Great Britain’s 2018 sexual abuse scandal surrounding its work in Haiti.
Second, organizational culture helps to differentiate an organization in the eyes of prospective employees, partners, and donors. Leaders who understand its importance can help their organizations better convey authentic characteristics or stand out from peers. For instance, Berkeley’s Haas School of Business found that by making explicit the principles that had long been present in its culture—“questioning the status quo,” “confidence without attitude,” “students always” (lifelong curiosity and learning), and “beyond yourself” (or leading ethically and responsibly)—it attracted students that were a stronger fit. The school drew on faculty, staff, and former students’ experiences to illustrate these principles, which resonated as authentic with key external audiences, including alumni and donors.
Finally, knowledge of one’s own and other organization’s cultures can help managers and employees guide change efforts and navigate effective partnerships. This knowledge is especially important as differences in culture can kill joint projects, even when partners agree on the goal. For example, nonprofit organizations may seek to work together on a social enterprising project to revitalize urban spaces but be sidelined when one organization’s formal and conservative culture clashes with another’s informal and socially progressive one.
At the same time, an organization can leverage aspects of its culture to make innovative partnerships or cross-organizational initiatives succeed. For instance, our ongoing work with supply chain partners—BT Group and Huawei Technologies—in the information and communications technology industry shows that aspects of their distinct cultures enabled the development of a novel contractual arrangement for supply chain sustainability, which tapped into core yet complementary elements of each culture. The buying firm was strongly committed to setting leading sustainability targets, while the supplying firm—still developing such sustainability leadership—used its deep technical knowledge and “customer first” mentality to deliver on a mutually developed, aggressive carbon reduction target.
Three Damaging Myths
The right organizational culture can create cohesion, differentiation, and effective partnerships. This is why managers prioritize establishing an organizational culture that reflects employees’ experiences and stays relevant to others’ expectations. Even when managers and leaders regard culture as largely effective and supportive of the organization’s aims, opportunities to adapt a culture to evolving demands, such as those for social responsibility or employee inclusivity, always arise. In other instances, employees want to know how to use valued aspects of their cultures to support new initiatives, like launching a new service offering, or extending projects to a new segment of the community. However, three common myths hold back efforts to improve organizational cultures or leverage them to support change.
Leadership exclusively defines and controls culture | The first myth is that senior leadership or organizational specialists from the human resources department exclusively define and direct culture.
Founders and early leaders, of course, are central in establishing key aspects of organizational culture, and new leaders seek to make their mark by redefining aspects of an organization’s culture to align with their own leadership or strategic vision. But leaders and managers sometimes overlook the fact that culture persists only because people act in ways that uphold its principles and codes.
Frequently, organizations articulate culture in terms of commitments or values. However, sociologist Ann Swidler has pointed out that people’s habits are what actually enable them to realize these commitments. In other words, culture is expressed and reified through practice; it is not merely established by proclamation. Leaders and managers recognize this idea when they “walk the talk”—that is, act in line with their culture. But Swidler’s argument goes further. She effectively asks that we pay attention to the many versions and variations of the “walks”—or practices—within an organization, and then from this assessment articulate an understanding of that culture as a collection of repeatedly used practices.
What skills or habits do people rely on when doing the required work of the organization? What common and varied ways of tackling problems, holding conversations, seeking feedback, or starting new initiatives are there? These aspects are what Swidler refers to as the “toolkit” of cultural resources. For example, in tackling problems, employees might draw from a cultural toolkit that includes self-reliance and entrepreneurial action, as well as consensus-based decision-making. These tools need not always complement each other; taking individual entrepreneurial action to tackle a problem is quite different from engaging in consensus-based decision-making. Knowing what to grab from the cultural toolkit and when to use it is part of operating effectively in an organization.
How frequently people enact the specific practices of a cultural toolkit signifies the value of that tool in the organization. But, Swidler asserts, we would be mistaken to conclude that an organization values, say, individualism over collectivism on the basis of observing people frequently addressing problems through self-reliance and entrepreneurial action. Values that seem shared may simply be the outcome—rather than the intention—of practices frequently drawn from a cultural toolkit. In other words, Swidler’s cultural toolkit puts an emphasis on the means by which people act, instead of the ends they seek.
This perspective reframes the myth that leadership espousing values and commitments perpetuates culture, and it alerts us to pay attention to the daily practices of people across an organization. That is, culture persists through the distributed actions of the many—not through unidirectional, top-down control. This new perspective allows for significant bottom-up shifts in culture when people intentionally or inadvertently alter the content and use of their organization’s cultural toolkit.
Organizational insiders create culture | A second myth about culture is that it is unique to an organization and determined largely by those within the organization. But recent scholarship suggests that thinking of culture as part of an “open system” is more accurate, in that people, norms, and trends outside the organization also inform it.
Just consider how pervasive issues of diversity, sustainability, or data privacy have become in every organization, driven by changes in social norms, technology, and regulation. Even the most long-lived and deeply established organizational culture must evolve to meet the expectations of its workforce and other stakeholders. If culture can be understood as a toolkit, then we must recognize that people are exposed to and become adept with several different toolkits, because they participate in multiple spheres of organizational—and nonorganizational—life. For instance, an employee who participates in advocacy work outside her professional workplace may use the mobilization techniques she acquires with peers at her workplace when she wants to convince them of the merits of a new project. If these mobilization practices are effective and others adopt them, the organization’s cultural toolkit expands. In this way, organizational boundaries can be understood as somewhat permeable to culture, making organizations open and interdependent with their environments. In fact, some organizations actively cultivate their employees’ experiences in other spheres to help shape their internal organizational culture. For example, an outdoor-equipment company actively drew on its employees’ experiences in their weekend rock-climbing communities to reinforce the use of self-reliance in solving problems in the workplace.
Culture operates through consensus | A third myth is that influencing behaviors and shaping how members navigate organizational change requires considerable alignment among and consensus about the elements of an organization’s culture. This mistake derives from the common tendency to identify an organization’s culture in its “shared values.”
In fact, the practices and beliefs that define a culture are frequently unevenly shared across diverse pockets of an organization and are sometimes rife with contradictory elements. The fact that some consensus is critical for cultural cohesion implies that common beliefs underpin even diverse actions. But cohesion should not be confused with unity, which implies uniform actions and beliefs. Culture functions smoothly when members understand the nuances of how, when, and where aspects of the cultural toolkit apply to their specific circumstances at specific times.
In an oil production company that we studied and wrote about in Organization Science, employees regularly drew on the “get ’er done” aspect of their cultural toolkit. This practice involved employees’ heroic actions to address problems as they arose, rather than laboring in anticipation of them—“putting out fires, rather than preventing them,” in their daily roles at production sites, even in more managerial positions. The cultural practice of “getting ’er done” meant that those who took initiative were admired by their peers and valued by their leaders. Simultaneously, company employees also regularly enacted a “follow the leader” cultural practice, which involved respecting the organization’s hierarchy and responding to criteria and priorities that leaders set.
While “getting ’er done” and following hierarchy might seem at odds in some organizations, they worked together in this company because of its unique history and industry demands. Some decades earlier, “get ’er done” actions were needed to build a viable business based on extracting oil sands in remote, harsh conditions, against technological and economic odds. At the same time, leaders at both the production and strategic levels set and adjusted priorities. Frontline employees acted quickly and decisively (“get ’er done”) on the priorities of the day (“follow the leader”). Furthermore, for this company, following the leader was not only about respecting hierarchy but also about having an accommodating, “can do” attitude. Echoing the words of a previous CEO, one manager observed that if you were a “naysayer,” you didn’t last long at the company. Seemingly contradictory aspects of a culture can work together when employees are at ease with how they intersect to support the work of the organization’s goals.
In sum, culture is practiced by employees at all levels—not defined solely by leadership. Forces outside the organization regularly influence it, in part through employees’ participation in multiple cultures, and the functioning of a culture does not require full alignment and consensus. These insights can create new ways of thinking about how to develop and direct organizational culture.
Three Cultural Toolkit Practices
We have identified three steps—almost as antidotes to the harmful myths about culture—for how managers and employees can use their organizations’ cultural toolkits to generate desired change or simply to channel their culture more effectively. These practices are taking inventory, repurposing, and guiding the cultural toolkit.
Take inventory | Often people get stuck reciting buzzwords for cultural aspirations (like “integrity,” “celebrating difference,” or “bold thinking”) that do not fully reflect the reality of the organization’s culture. Although these terms can express important aspirations, they should not be confused with the actual workings of a culture. Start by defining the “what is” in your culture—the suite of practices that constitute how people get things done across the organization. This first step, which we call taking inventory, clears the way to think about how to guide the culture toward potentially new aims.
Taking inventory of a cultural toolkit involves being clear about the habitual ways in which day-to-day work gets done. Members of an organization taking inventory should ask, What common practices do people rely on to tackle problems? What actions do people resort to, or how do they behave when they face significant issues? They can also look closely at the actions of people who get ahead in the organization. Do they have relatively common ways of working?
Routine approaches to problem-solving suggest widely used and valued tools. For example, in the outdoor company mentioned above, employees in a wide variety of functions were resourceful and self-reliant when challenges arose in their day-to-day work, such as being behind on a project or struggling with an IT implementation. The widespread use of this practice across a variety of individuals, roles, and tasks—and supported by their experience of self-reliance in rock climbing and its active infusion into the workplace—suggests it is a part of the company’s cultural toolkit, rather than individual behavior.
Since perceiving and assessing one’s own culture from the inside is difficult, think as well about what a newcomer to the organization would need to know to do their job successfully and to fit in to the organization’s culture. Or ask a relatively recent hire what they have learned about how things get done in the organization. Just as aspects of a national or regional culture can be more visible to outsiders, so, too, can contrasts between organizations be valuable for uncovering taken-for-granted, or deeply ingrained, aspects of organizational culture. These understandings of “how”—or the habits and practices of employees in their day-to-day work—likely point toward valued aspects of the cultural toolkit. Sometimes these are tied to the organization’s identity and therefore are considered by employees difficult to change without threatening the core assumptions of “who we are” as an organization.
Other aspects of a cultural toolkit may be shared infrequently among organizational members. For example, employees in creative roles take risks and experiment more than those in operational or financial ones. Some diversity in the uses of a cultural toolkit is common, because a cultural toolkit is just that—an enabler of action that is adaptable to different circumstances. Understanding the varied and potentially flexible use of your organization’s cultural toolkit—what aspects are used, when, and by whom—can help leaders and managers isolate which practices are most valuable, should be retained, and might be levers for change.
Finally, an organization may become more aware of its cultural toolkit by working with outside entities in programs that advocate certain practices, standards, or commitments. For example, organizational leaders report that a main benefit of adopting a B Corp certification (a program certifying companies for having business models that balance purpose and profit) is having to go through the process of auditing organizational practices. Many leaders say they are surprised to find that their companies’ values and identities match those of the B Corp program but that the practices fall short in many respects—such as a lack of personnel benefits; wasteful, single-use office kitchen supplies; sourcing energy from nonrenewables; and disproportionate executive compensation. Many of these organizations find the process of inventorying their cultural toolkit especially useful for identifying where they can improve to align themselves with the B Corp ethos.
Repurpose elements | Organizations seeking change need not dismantle established practices and begin from scratch. They can use valued aspects of their existing cultural toolkit. This method of enacting cultural change, furthermore, need not rely on the initiative of senior leaders. Even when leaders are involved, an organization can pursue change by redirecting aspects of its existing cultural toolkit. In our research, we have identified two ways to repurpose a toolkit this way.
First, leaders can be selective about which aspects of the cultural toolkit they use when introducing a planned change, and about how they sequence and combine these aspects. For example, a senior leader at the oil production company we studied expedited the uptake of a new environment, health, and safety (EHS) compliance routine by appealing to employees’ tendencies to follow their immediate line leaders’ behaviors (“follow the leader”) and simultaneously encouraged line leaders to act in ways that countered heroic “get ’er done” habits. Line leaders, in turn, were required to observe operational conditions and anticipate problems, in order to demonstrate that following the leader now included more proactive moves on EHS compliance. Elsewhere in the organization, leaders did not redirect employees’ “get ’er done” tendencies; that led to slower uptake of the EHS compliance routine because employees relied on past habits.
Second, champions of change at any level of an organization can repurpose practices in a more gradual process of “grafting” a new goal or issue onto existing aspects of the cultural toolkit. For example, the employees at the athletic-apparel company used two core aspects of the cultural toolkit to graft sustainability. To introduce the idea that sustainability criteria could become central to the company’s product innovation, these employees built on their prior preparation, which characterized sustainability criteria for athletic-apparel production through a well-researched checklist, and introduced this checklist to designers as part of an internal design competition. Design teams could earn bronze, silver, or gold awards for integrating different levels of sustainability performance into their new products. By making a new concern—sustainability—approachable through several existing, valued aspects of the cultural toolkit (i.e., innovation and competition), employees across a number of interventions effectively repurposed the company’s commitment to innovation so that it was directed at sustainability. Through careful, patient work and a clear understanding of their company’s cultural toolkit, any employee has the power to foster change through grafting issues onto existing cultural practices.
These approaches to generate change through repurposing aspects of an organization’s cultural toolkit build on the competencies, skills, and habits that employees already have, effectively making change more palatable and possible. Those leading changemaking endeavors can amplify existing cultural practices to support change, but they should understand that the use of other practices might have to be actively suppressed, as in the case of the oil company leader who tamped down employees’ “get ’er done” habits, to achieve lasting change.
Guide the adoption and use of new tools | To some degree, an organization is constantly being exposed to new expectations or ways of doing things that may or may not be productive for its cultural toolkit. These insurgent practices can arise through intentional interactions with other organizations or simply because employees exist in multiple spheres beyond their workplaces that expose them to diverse cultural toolkits. Leaders or managers can direct their cultural toolkit by taking regular inventory of an organization’s cultural toolkit and being explicit about what aspects are subject to change or put to different use because of permeable organizational boundaries—even when change is not desired.
Maintaining an organizational culture in face of its exposure to other cultural toolkits takes effort. When change is required, understanding how the open nature of cultural toolkits can support such change is important. One of our authors’ studies on the development of a sustainability certification program in the wine industry shows how member vineyard organizations identified practices from the program—such as growing areas of natural grasses as buffer zones—that better conceptualized sustainability. This alignment helped integrate these new practices into their organization’s culture to further its progress toward more sustainable operations.
For example, by joining the certification, vineyard members gained consensus on practices that would support sustainable operations in grape growing and winemaking. As a result, they implemented practices that aligned with their cultural understanding of sustainability as helping their own farms, as well as with the industry in general. They also learned that growing and preserving undisturbed areas of native grasses on their land would both foster “beneficial insects” that reduced the need for insecticides and herbicides on their own farms and protect neighboring farms from pest infestations. This process evolved over time, as managers assessed how employees used the new practices and made adjustments as they learned what would align best with their cultural toolkits.
Culture as Action
Thinking about culture as a toolkit helps us understand daily organizational life from a new perspective. Culture is not a simple statement of values or aspirations. Rather, it is a complex and sometimes inconsistent repertoire of practices that underpin day-to-day work. Through this lens, we can also identify new ways of understanding how to develop and direct culture. When culture is a toolkit that everyone sustains through use, cultural change and maintenance become democratized. People at any level of an organization can repurpose or graft new ideas onto existing aspects of the cultural toolkit, or they may even help influence a shift in the organization’s cultural toolkit by drawing on their use of and exposure to cultural toolkits from other settings or organizations.
Three strengths arise from striving to inventory, repurpose, and guide aspects of an organization’s cultural toolkit. First, by working from an inventory of existing cultural practices, we can articulate change concretely. Trying to instate new values and aspirations is challenging, so appealing to employees’ skills and habits can help to ground otherwise vague aspirations. Second, repurposing existing aspects of the cultural toolkit makes change less threatening to employees, for they can leverage familiar practices, rather than feel as if these are being altered or discarded entirely. Finally, guiding culture responds to the challenge occurring across sectors to integrate new societal concerns about equity, justice, and sustainability.
Employees and other stakeholders increasingly care about social and environmental issues. By helping them connect these concerns with aspects of the existing cultural toolkit, organizations can not only speed uptake and action on these issues but also do so in a way that is authentic to their missions and their members’ experiences and skills.
Read more stories by Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Brooke Lahneman & Simon Pek.