What is company culture

Those that favor stability tend to follow rules, use control structures such as seniority-based staffing, reinforce hierarchy, and strive for efficiency. Those that favor flexibility tend to prioritize innovation, openness, diversity, and a longer-term orientation. Kim Cameron, Robert Quinn, and Robert Ernest are among the researchers who employ similar dimensions in their culture frameworks.

By applying this fundamental insight about the dimensions of people interactions and response to change, we have identified eight styles that apply to both organizational cultures and individual leaders. Caring focuses on relationships and mutual trust. Work environments are warm, collaborative, and welcoming places where people help and support one another.

Employees are united by loyalty; leaders emphasize sincerity, teamwork, and positive relationships. Purpose is exemplified by idealism and altruism. Work environments are tolerant, compassionate places where people try to do good for the long-term future of the world. Employees are united by a focus on sustainability and global communities; leaders emphasize shared ideals and contributing to a greater cause. Learning is characterized by exploration, expansiveness, and creativity.

Work environments are inventive and open-minded places where people spark new ideas and explore alternatives. Employees are united by curiosity; leaders emphasize innovation, knowledge, and adventure. Enjoyment is expressed through fun and excitement. Work environments are lighthearted places where people tend to do what makes them happy. Employees are united by playfulness and stimulation; leaders emphasize spontaneity and a sense of humor.

Results is characterized by achievement and winning. Work environments are outcome-oriented and merit-based places where people aspire to achieve top performance. Employees are united by a drive for capability and success; leaders emphasize goal accomplishment. Authority is defined by strength, decisiveness, and boldness.

Work environments are competitive places where people strive to gain personal advantage. Employees are united by strong control; leaders emphasize confidence and dominance. Safety is defined by planning, caution, and preparedness.

Work environments are predictable places where people are risk-conscious and think things through carefully. Employees are united by a desire to feel protected and anticipate change; leaders emphasize being realistic and planning ahead. Order is focused on respect, structure, and shared norms.

Work environments are methodical places where people tend to play by the rules and want to fit in. Employees are united by cooperation; leaders emphasize shared procedures and time-honored customs. These eight styles fit into our integrated culture framework according to the degree to which they reflect independence or interdependence people interactions and flexibility or stability response to change.

Styles that are adjacent in the framework, such as safety and order, frequently coexist within organizations and their people. In contrast, styles that are located across from each other, such as safety and learning, are less likely to be found together and require more organizational energy to maintain simultaneously.

Each style has advantages and disadvantages, and no style is inherently better than another. An organizational culture can be defined by the absolute and relative strengths of each of the eight and by the degree of employee agreement about which styles characterize the organization.

On the basis of decades of experience analyzing organizations, executives, and employees, we developed a rigorous, comprehensive model to identify the key attributes of both group culture and individual leadership styles. Eight characteristics emerge when we map cultures along two dimensions: how people interact independence to interdependence and their response to change flexibility to stability.

The relative salience of these eight styles differs across organizations, though nearly all are strongly characterized by results and caring. The spatial relationships are important. Proximate styles, such as safety and order, or learning and enjoyment, will coexist more easily than styles that are far apart on the chart, such as authority and purpose, or safety and learning.

Achieving a culture of authority often means gaining the advantages and living with the disadvantages of that culture but missing out on the advantages and avoiding the disadvantages of a culture of purpose. Inherent in the framework are fundamental trade-offs. Although each style can be beneficial, natural constraints and competing demands force difficult choices about which values to emphasize and how people are expected to behave.

It is common to find organizations with cultures that emphasize both results and caring, but this combination can be confusing to employees. Are they expected to optimize individual goals and strive for outcomes at all costs, or should they work as a team and emphasize collaboration and shared success? The nature of the work itself, the business strategy, or the design of the organization may make it difficult for employees to be equally results focused and caring.

In contrast, a culture that emphasizes caring and order encourages a work environment in which teamwork, trust, and respect are paramount. The two styles are mutually reinforcing, which can be beneficial but can also present challenges. The benefits are strong loyalty, retention of talent, lack of conflict, and high levels of engagement. Savvy leaders make use of existing cultural strengths and have a nuanced understanding of how to initiate change.

Top leaders and founders often express cultural sentiments within the public domain, either intentionally or unintentionally. Having a deeper, more transcendent purpose is highly energizing for all of the various interdependent stakeholders. And when we are setting the rules for the securities markets, there are many rules we, the SEC, must follow.

In the battle with lions, wolves have terrifying abilities. With a strong desire to win and no fear of losing, they stick to the goal firmly, making the lions exhausted in every possible way. The eight styles can be used to diagnose and describe highly complex and diverse behavioral patterns in a culture and to model how likely an individual leader is to align with and shape that culture.

Using this framework and multilevel approach, managers can:. Our research and practical experience have shown that when you are evaluating how culture affects outcomes, the context in which the organization operates—geographic region, industry, strategy, leadership, and company structure—matters, as does the strength of the culture.

Consider the case of a best-in-class retailer headquartered in the United States. The company had viewed its first priority as providing top-notch customer service. It accomplished this with a simple rule—Do right by the customer—that encouraged employees to use their judgment when providing service.

In measuring the culture of this company, we found that like many other large retailers, it was characterized primarily by a combination of results and caring. Unlike many other retailers, however, it had a culture that was also very flexible, learning oriented, and focused on purpose. For marketing agency Brains On Fire, these initial conversations formed the basis of their company values. What is the experience you want to your employees to have?

What do you want customers to say about your company? What behavior is inbounds and what is out-of-bounds? This is where leaders must step up to move beyond words into action. Your mission, vision and values often reside on the wall, but the company culture is HOW you achieve those ends. If integrity is a core value, make sure everyone knows what it means to ACT with integrity.

If transparency is a core value, make sure you demonstrate WHAT transparency looks like. Monitoring and analyzing employee feedback trends via an employee survey platform like Emprising will help guide your strategic HR decisions. Change involves introspection, so, naturally, the best leaders put a lot of focus on reflection. Dec 10, , pm EST. Nov 10, , am EST.

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