Giving Compass' Take:

• Organizational culture can guide companies into achieving their social sustainability goals and channel more inclusive practices. 

• What are some ways you can improve the organizational culture where you work? 

• Read more about strengthening organizational culture. 

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.

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.

Read the full article about organizational culture by Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Brooke Lahneman & Simon Pek at Stanford Social Innovation Review.