Defining Company Culture

A company’s culture is the unspoken social order that exists inside the organization: It has a wide-ranging and long-lasting impact on people’s views and behavior. Within a group, cultural norms establish what is promoted, discouraged, accepted, and rejected by the members of the group. When culture is correctly matched with individual beliefs, motivations, and needs, it has the potential to release great quantities of energy toward a common goal and increase an organization’s ability to grow. Also possible is for culture to develop in a flexible and independent manner in response to shifting possibilities and needs. The C-suite traditionally determines strategy, but organizational culture may seamlessly merge the goals of top executives with the expertise and experiences of front-line workers to create a more cohesive whole.

As someone once stated, culture is the breakfast of champions for strategy.
The amount of scholarly material available on the issue is enormous. it found a plethora of formal definitions of organizational culture, as well as a diverse range of models and methodologies for evaluating it. There are a plethora of procedures for both generating and altering it. Although there is little agreement on details among various definitions, models, and approaches,

Shared.

Culture is a phenomenon that occurs inside a group. It cannot be found entirely inside a single individual, nor can it be defined as the average of a group of individuals’ qualities. Shared behaviors, attitudes, and assumptions serve as the foundation for group identity, which is most typically experienced via the norms and expectations of a group—that is, through the unwritten laws.

Pervasive.

Culture pervades all levels of an organization and has a wide range of applications; it is often even confused with the organization itself. Collective behaviors, physical settings, group rituals, visual symbols, myths, and legends are all examples of how it manifests itself. In addition to outward appearances, there are intangible parts of culture to consider, such as attitudes, motives, implicit assumptions, and what David Rooke and William Torbert call “action logics

Enduring.

Over the course of a lifetime, group members’ views and behaviors might be influenced by their culture. It takes shape as a result of significant events in the collective life and learning of a community. Aspects of its durability are described in part by the attraction-selection-attrition model developed by Benjamin Schneider, which is as follows: People are attracted to organizations that have traits that are similar to their own; organizations are more likely to pick people who seem to “fit in,” and those who do not appear to “fit in” tend to depart after a short period of time. So culture develops into a self-reinforcing social structure that becomes more resistant to change and outside influences as time passes.

Implicit.
The fact that, despite the fact that culture is subliminal in nature, individuals are functionally built to perceive and react to it intuitively is a crucial and often ignored feature of culture. It serves as a sort of nonverbal communication. Shalom Schwartz and E.O. Wilson have demonstrated through their research how evolutionary processes shaped human capacity; because the ability to sense and respond to culture is universal, it should be expected that certain themes will recur across the many models, definitions, and studies in the field of cultural psychology. In fact, it is precisely what we have learned through our study over the last several decades:

Reference:  Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price and J. Yo-Jud Cheng – How to manage the eight critical elements of organizational life (Harvard Business Review – January–February 2018)