What is culture?
Culture defines what is encouraged, discouraged, accepted or rejected within a group/team and, when aligned with personal values and needs, can energize teams to work toward a shared purpose.
Two Primary dimensions of culture
- How people interact with each other: Individuals and organizations alike tend to be oriented towards a way of working - Independently or Interdependently
- How people respond to change: With the emphasis to maintaining Stability or seeking flexibility
Eight different cultural styles can be mapped into the framework oriented around these two axes:
Various Cultural Types
- Caring: Caring workplaces are warm, collaborative, and welcoming. They are also prevalent. 63% of companies ranked this style first or second in their organization culture.
- Purpose: Work environment that emphasize purpose are tolerant and compassionate, with a uniting focus on altruism and contributing to the greater good. 9% of organizations ranked highly purpose oriented culture.
- Learning: Learning culture is characterized by exploration and creativity, with inventive and open-minded work environments. 7% of organizations rank this style highly.
- Enjoyment: These are light hearted playful work environments are characterized by high morale, engagement and creativity. Only 2% of companies rank Enjoyment at the top of their cultural profile.
- Results: A result-oriented culture is all about goals, achievement and winning, and is highly ranked in more companies than any of the other styles at 89%.
- Authority: Authority culture is decisive, bold and competitive with strong, confident leaders. 4% of companies rank this style highly.
- Safety: These workplaces are predictable, realistic, and risk-conscious, defined by planning and caution. 8% of companies rank Safety at the top in their culture profile.
- Order: In these structured and methodical work environments, people play by the rules and tend to want to fit in. 15% of organizational culture highly prioritize order
Framework to decide your culture
Organizational/Company’s cultures is defined by the absolute and relative strength of these eight styles. Each of them has pros and cons and no style is inherently better than another.
When assessing an organization’s culture, the degree of employee agreement about the organization’s cultural styles also matters. In the figure above, proximate circles represent similar employee views, while those in different quadrants indicate varying and often opposite views of the culture.
If everyone within an organization/team, agrees on the attributes of the organization/team culture, you have got high convergence. If an organization has a culture that is aligned to its business environment and strategy, then this can correlate with higher employee engagement and customer orientation, but it also means that the culture would be much more difficult to change. If people are citing many different attributes, you have got low convergence. While this may be a bit chaotic at present, it can also be ripe for changing if you aspire to have different company culture. Once leaders know where their organizational culture falls within this framework, many recognize the need for change, which can entail strengthening some cultural styles while diminishing others.
How does this all fit in?
Research shows that Results and Caring are consistently ranked at or nearly at the top of everyone’s list, but other attributes tend to differ dependending on many factors such as region, industry, strategy and organizational design.
The research found evidence that organizations might adapt to meet the demands of their external environments when comparing cultures across industries. Purpose, for example, is in health care’s top 3, while barely registering in consumer staples. A culture can drive positive organizational outcomes when aligned with strategy and leadership, so it follows that cultural style may vary with organizational strategy. The companies pursuing a differentiation strategy tend to prioritize learning, purpose and enjoyment over order. Another consideration is how different cultural styles drive employee engagement and customer orientation. Enjoyment is the biggest differentiator for companies with high employee engagement, while learning tops the list in differentiating companies with strong emphasis on customer orientation.