The Welsh novelist and political theorist Raymond Williams wrote that “Culture is one of the two or three most complicated words in the English language”. Indeed, the word has many different meanings, which are subtly different yet interconnected. So what, exactly, is a “company culture”?
Well, company culture is the subject of a fascinating 2018 study by four academics writing in the Harvard Business Review, entitled ‘The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture’. In their work, Groysberg, Lee, Price and Cheng draw on a century or more of academic literature on cultural studies as they struggle to pin down what a ‘company culture’ is. They propose that a culture is something that is shared, pervasive, enduring, and implicit.
In other words, a culture is a group phenomenon (it cannot exist in one person alone), which permeates the whole group, exists over the long term, and shapes people’s behavior without necessarily being aware of it. It guides the way the people of an organization behave through a set of “shared assumptions and group norms”.
