Can organizational culture be changed? What moves it, and what only decorates it
Every culture change starts with new words. Many end there: a values refresh, a launch event, posters in the lift, a month of enthusiasm. A year later people describe the company exactly as they did before, because nothing they see every day has changed.
The short answer: yes, culture can be changed — but not by announcing it. Culture changes when what people repeatedly see rewarded, tolerated and modelled changes. That happens through leaders' behaviour, decisions about money and people, hiring and promotion, recognition, and the rituals of everyday work. Specific behaviours can shift within months when those systems change; deeper assumptions take years. Measure the behaviours, not the mood.
What is organizational culture, in practice?
How things really get done here — not how the values statement says they should be done. Edgar Schein, whose work underpins most culture practice, describes three levels: visible artifacts and behaviour, the beliefs and values people state, and the basic assumptions people no longer question. Culture lives mostly in the third level, and the third level is learned from experience: people watch what happens to those who speak up, cut corners, help a colleague or miss a target, and they adjust.
That is why culture is hard to change and why it can be changed. It is learned, so it can be relearned — but only from new experience — not from new slogans.
Can organizational culture be managed?
Not directly. You cannot instruct people to believe something. You can manage the conditions they learn from. Schein's work describes how leaders embed culture: through what they pay attention to, measure and control, how they react to crises, how they allocate resources, rewards and status, what they model themselves, and whom they hire, promote and let go. Every one of those is a lever.
| Lever | What it changes | Example | Why it works |
|---|---|---|---|
| Leaders' attention | What people believe matters | The leadership meeting starts with customer complaints instead of the sales table | People watch what leaders ask about first |
| Reactions to mistakes and crises | Whether it is safe to speak up | A leader thanks the person who reported a problem before asking who caused it | One public reaction teaches more than a policy |
| Money and time | What is really a priority | Budget moved to the initiative the values say matters | Spending is the most credible signal an organisation sends |
| Role modelling | What good looks like | A leader asks for challenge in a meeting and changes a decision because of it | People copy what leaders do, not what they say |
| Hiring and promotion | Who succeeds here | Promotion criteria include how results were achieved, not just the results | People copy the people who get promoted |
| Recognition | Which behaviours spread | Recognition names the specific behaviour behind the result | What is celebrated is repeated |
| Rituals and routines | How work feels day to day | Weekly team huddles where anyone can raise a blocker | Habits carry culture when no one is watching |
| Measures | What gets managed | Tracking whether decisions are made at the right level, not just how fast | Measurement tells people what the organisation really values |
How do you change organizational culture?
Work in sequence, and pull a few levers together rather than every lever at once.
- Set a baseline of the current and preferred culture with one instrument.
- Choose two or three behaviours that would close the most important gap.
- Change the levers behind them: what leaders ask about, what gets funded, who is promoted and what is recognised.
- Measure the same behaviours again in about a year, with the same instrument.
What only decorates culture?
Anything that changes what people hear — not what they experience. Posters, slogans, a launch event without follow-through, one-off training, renaming a department, a new set of values that leaves promotion criteria untouched. These are not useless — a good launch can open the door — but on their own they teach people that culture is a communication exercise.
The gap shows in the data. In Gallup's 2016 research, just 23% of US employees strongly agreed that they can apply their organisation's values to their work every day, and 27% strongly believed in their company's values. Our article on why most values launches fail looks at the launch itself; the work that decides the result starts after it.
What makes a culture toxic, and why does it drive people out?
One large study names three leading elements: failure to promote diversity, equity and inclusion; workers feeling disrespected; and unethical behaviour. That study is an MIT Sloan Management Review analysis of 34 million online employee profiles in the US. It also found that a toxic corporate culture was 10.4 times more powerful than compensation in predicting a company's attrition rate compared with its industry, during 2021's wave of resignations. A toxic culture drives people out because it is the part of work they cannot negotiate around. The study is predictive, not causal, covers large US companies, and comes from authors with a commercial interest in culture analytics — but its direction is hard to ignore. You can match a competitor's salary in a week; you cannot match its culture by decree.
What does a values activation look like in practice?
A launch opens the door; it works when the levers above follow it. When e& Egypt refreshed its values — Be Customer-Obsessed, Dare to Be Bold, Unite as One — the aim was to move them from a statement on a wall into shared language and behaviour across every department. We built the campaign identity, branded and communicated a large-scale values-driven team-building programme with the client's Culture and DEI team and their facilitation partner, and handled the activation experience end to end. e& Egypt's Culture team reported 18 values team-building sessions across 14 departments and more than 4,000 employees engaged; in the client's own words, "we don't just talk about our culture, we live it". Publicly credited to GoldinKollar by e& Egypt’s Culture & DEI team on LinkedIn. More on our case studies page.
How long does culture change take, and how do you know it is moving?
There is no reliable universal timeline — only a sequence. What moves first is behaviour in the specific practices you changed; what moves last is what people take for granted. Plan in two horizons: visible changes in chosen behaviours within the first months, and a shift people describe without prompting over a longer period.
Track movement with evidence you can repeat:
- Behavioural indicators tied to the target behaviours, such as the share of decisions made at team level, or near-miss reports per site.
- A culture assessment, repeated about a year apart with the same instrument, looking at the gap between current and preferred culture. Our comparison of culture assessment tools helps choose one.
- Stories: the examples people give, unprompted, when asked what it is like to work here.
- Who stays and who leaves, in the groups the change was meant to reach.
Be wary of one statistic. The claim that 70% of change programmes fail is widely repeated, but a review of its sources found no valid empirical evidence for it (Hughes, 2011). The honest question is not how often change fails — it is whether your levers are actually pulled.
Frequently asked questions
Can organizational culture be changed quickly?
Specific behaviours can change within months when leaders, systems and recognition change together. Deeper assumptions take years. Anything promising a new culture in a quarter is selling a launch.
Who is responsible for organizational culture?
Leaders, through what they do, decide and reward. HR and communication teams design the systems and the moments, but culture follows leaders' behaviour more than any programme.
What are the signs of a toxic culture?
People are afraid to raise problems, credit and blame are distributed unfairly, rules apply differently to different people, unethical shortcuts are tolerated when results are good, and people describe feeling disrespected.
Why do culture change programmes fail?
Usually because they change words but not experience: values are announced while promotion criteria, budgets and leaders' behaviour stay the same. People believe what they see rewarded.
What is the difference between organizational culture and values?
Values are what an organisation says it stands for. Culture is how it actually behaves. Culture change is the work of closing the gap between the two.
Sources
- Schein, E.H. with Schein, P., Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th edition (Wiley, 2017). oreilly.com
- Dvorak, N. and Nelson, B. (2016), "Few employees believe in their company's values", Gallup. gallup.com
- Sull, D., Sull, C. and Zweig, B. (2022), "Toxic culture is driving the Great Resignation", MIT Sloan Management Review. sloanreview.mit.edu
- Hughes, M. (2011), "Do 70 per cent of all organizational change initiatives really fail?", Journal of Change Management 11(4). research.brighton.ac.uk
- e& Egypt values activation, as published on GoldinKollar's case studies page. goldinkollar.com