Organizational Culture in Change

Edgar Schein, a social psychologist at MIT, defined culture as the shared basic assumptions a group has learned while solving its problems of adapting to the outside world and of working together inside. Assumptions that worked well enough are taught to newcomers as the right way to perceive, think and feel.

Two points matter for change. Culture is learned, so it can be relearned, but slowly. And culture is shared: it belongs to a group, so an organization can hold several subcultures, for example in operations, finance or a regional office.

Organizational culture is therefore the context every change lands in, not a side topic for HR.

1. Artifacts. Everything visible: office layout, dress, language, meetings, ceremonies, published processes. Artifacts are easy to observe but hard to interpret: the same open-plan office can mean openness or surveillance.
2. Espoused values. What the organization says it believes: value statements, strategies, stated rules. They explain behavior only when they match the deeper level.
3. Basic underlying assumptions. Beliefs so taken for granted that people rarely discuss them, such as "senior people are never challenged in public". They are the real source of behavior.

When espoused values and assumptions disagree, behavior follows the assumptions. At Harbourside Council, leaders announce a value of openness, yet staff still avoid raising problems in meetings, because the working assumption is that bad news damages careers.

Schein's model of organizational culture therefore points a change manager below the visible surface.

Climate is the shared perception of how it feels to work in the organization now: what people see being rewarded, supported and expected. Some change texts call it the organization's mood.

Schneider, Ehrhart and Macey (2013) describe the two as related: climate reflects what people experience, culture explains why those practices exist.

Organizational culture and climate should therefore not be confused: a better engagement score does not mean the culture has changed.

At Larchfield Logistics, a new collaborative planning process clashes with a deep assumption that each depot competes with the others. Three implications follow:

• Assess fit early. Map how the change aligns with, or contradicts, current assumptions. A change that contradicts them needs more time, more leadership attention and more support.
• Work through behavior, not slogans. New value statements change artifacts and espoused values only. Assumptions shift when new behaviors are tried, succeed and are reinforced by what leaders measure, reward and pay attention to.
• Expect anxiety. Questioning shared assumptions threatens identity. Schein links this to learning anxiety, which must be reduced rather than overridden.

Organizational culture is therefore both a constraint on a change and, for larger changes, one of the things that must change.

• Treating culture as the values poster. The poster is an artifact; the culture is what people assume when no one is watching.
• Assuming one culture. Subcultures in different functions or sites can react to the same change in opposite ways.
• Trying to change culture directly. Culture is an outcome of shared experience. It changes as a by-product of new practices that work.
• Labeling all resistance as "culture". Some resistance is about workload, skills or a flawed design, and needs a practical fix.

Organizational culture is therefore best treated as something to understand and work with, not a lever to pull.