Think organizational culture is limited to the formality of dress and the length of coffee breaks? Think again.
Culture shapes innumerable aspects of workplace functioning, everything from how information is shared and news is spread to how mistakes are handled and questions are received.
But almost no facet of organizational performance is more impacted by culture than interpersonal interactions.
The way people work (and don’t) with each other, the way departments collaborate with (or undermine) each other — countless human underpinnings of organizational life receive their form from workplace culture.
What does this mean, in practical terms? A social service agency we once worked with provides a telling example.
This organization was in the process of absorbing a smaller provider of similar services, and the partnership was the cause of considerable excitement. The new agency was free from many of the problems that plagued the parent organization — things like criticism, negativity, and backbiting — and it was hoped that the influx of new blood might provide the catalyst for some much-needed changes.
For a time, that expectation seemed well founded. The merger sparked changes in numerous areas and conditions seemed to be on a generally upward trend.
But as the new staff spent more and more time with the old, their fresh attitudes and productive approaches began to fade. Slowly, but surely, they adapted to and adopted the norms and patterns of behavior they saw around them. In time, the two groups were virtually indistinguishable from one another.
“They were so positive and constructive in the beginning,” one executive lamented not six month after the launce of the merger. “Now they’re just like us.”
This agency’s experience illustrates what a powerful role culture plays in shaping workplace dynamics. Leaders tend to assume that employee attitudes stem from personal temperament. Dividing the world into “good attitude” and “bad attitude” employees, they assume a successful workplace is built by identifying the former and avoiding the latter in the hiring process.
But the employees of the small agency mentioned above didn’t transform their attitudes out of the blue and for no discernable reason. They operated one way under one set of cultural norms, and another (less productive) way under another.
Put simply, one culture created positive and productive employees, and one culture created negative and fault-finding ones.
Leaders often fall into the trap of lamenting the poor quality of “employees these days.” Rarely, though, do they consider the possibility that the real problem might be the organizational culture they themselves are creating. Rarely do they consider the possibility that the problem might not be in the hiring process but rather an workplace culture that systematically turns the “right” employees into the “wrong” ones.
