What is Schein's model of organizational culture? The three levels, explained with workplace examples

Search for Schein and you find the same diagram everywhere: three stacked layers, three labels, and almost nothing on what to do with them. That is a waste, because Edgar Schein's model is one of the few culture frameworks that explains why a values launch can be applauded in the ballroom and ignored on the shop floor.

The short answer: Schein's model of organizational culture says every culture has three levels. Artifacts are what you can see and hear: structures, processes, rituals, how meetings run. Espoused beliefs and values are what the organisation says it stands for. Basic underlying assumptions are beliefs so taken for granted that nobody discusses them, and they drive behaviour. When what you see contradicts what is said, the assumptions usually explain why.

What is Schein's model of organizational culture?

Edgar Schein (1928–2023) was a social psychologist and professor of management at the MIT Sloan School of Management. He set out the model in Organizational Culture and Leadership, first published in 1985; the fifth edition, written with Peter Schein, appeared in 2017.

For Schein, culture is a property of a group: the shared learning its members build up as they work out how to survive in their environment and how to hold together inside. So culture covers how a group deals with customers, competitors and regulators, not only how colleagues get along; Schein called reducing it to the inside part one of the commonest mistakes. And because culture is learned from what worked, it is stable. Our guide to what organizational culture is covers the other ways of defining it.

The levels are also a sequence. Founders and early leaders impose ways of working. If the organisation succeeds, people come to see those ways as correct and some are named as official values. The ones that keep working drop out of awareness and become assumptions. Schein described his model as that sequence, shown at one moment in time.

What are artifacts?

Artifacts (artefacts in British spelling) are the visible level: everything you see and feel when you walk into an organisation, including the everyday habits of how things are done.

• Physical and verbal: office layout, who has a door, what hangs on the walls, acronyms, whether people say "we" or "they" about head office.
• Processes and structures: the organisation chart, approval limits, the meeting calendar, how performance ratings are calibrated.
• Behaviour and ritual: who speaks first in meetings, how long people wait before disagreeing, what a new joiner's first day looks like.

Artifacts are easy to see and easy to misread. A silent meeting can mean agreement, fear, boredom or respect for seniority; an open-plan floor can signal openness or surveillance. You cannot read meaning off an artifact without the levels below it, which is why newcomers, new chief executives included, can misjudge a culture in their first month.

What are espoused beliefs and values?

The middle level is what the organisation claims it is and wants to be: values statements, strategy documents, codes of conduct, leadership speeches. Schein noticed that these were usually short lists of abstract words — integrity, teamwork, quality — that often did not match the behaviour he observed.

They still matter: they give people shared language and an aspiration leaders can be held to. But people test them against experience. In Gallup's 2016 research, just 23% of US employees strongly agreed that they could apply their organisation's values to their work every day, and 27% strongly believed in their company's values. The figures are about ten years old and from one country, but most HR leaders will recognise the gap they point to.

Separate aspirations from claims. "We want to decide faster" is honest about where you are going. "We are empowered" invites people to compare it with the approval chain they used this morning. A launch that presents aspirations as claims invites that comparison on day one; our article on why most values launches fail looks at that moment.

What are basic underlying assumptions?

They are beliefs that were once explicit values but worked so well that they became taken for granted and increasingly non-negotiable. People rarely state them, and often could not if asked. When artifacts and espoused values disagree, assumptions decide behaviour.

Schein's own example: many US organisations espouse teamwork, yet hiring, pay and promotion are built around individual performance, and group pay is unthinkable. The assumption underneath is that individual competition is the key to success. Others are best written as sentences nobody would say out loud:

• "Bad news is the messenger's problem." Problems surface late; project reports stay green until the week before the deadline.
• "Commitment means visible hours." People stay until the manager leaves; the flexible-working policy goes unused.
• "Results excuse behaviour." The top performer who belittles colleagues is promoted, one of the ways a toxic work culture takes hold.

A hypothetical example closer to home: a family-owned group in Egypt and Saudi Arabia adopts "speak up" as a value, yet in site meetings nobody contradicts a senior colleague in front of others. The assumption may not be "we hide problems" but "respect means not contradicting a senior person in public". A campaign against silence would miss the point. The design question is how to give bad news a respectful route: a private word before the meeting, a written round, an explicit invitation to disagree from the senior leader.

Assumptions are not bad by definition. Some are the reason the organisation succeeded, such as "we never ship anything unsafe". The task is to find which help and which block what you now need.

How do leaders embed culture, according to Schein?

Through what they do far more than what they say. Schein watched a founder build a culture through whom he hired, how he trained and managed people, and the structures and processes he set up. He names six primary embedding mechanisms, and each one teaches something specific.

Schein also lists secondary reinforcement mechanisms: organisation design and structure, systems and procedures, rites and rituals, the design of physical space and buildings, stories about important events and people, and formal statements of philosophy, values and creeds. They are secondary because they work only when they are consistent with the primary mechanisms; when they are not, people ignore them or they become a source of internal conflict.

That is the most practical idea in the model. A values statement, a redesigned office and new rituals are all secondary. They can reinforce what leaders already embed through attention, crises, money, modelling, rewards and people decisions; they cannot replace it. Our article on whether organizational culture can be changed turns these mechanisms into levers.

How do you use Schein's model to diagnose your culture?

Schein worked as a consultant and field researcher: he described one company's culture by interviewing and observing its employees and managers. The model tells you where to look; it is not a questionnaire.

• Step 1: start from a business problem. "Describe our culture" produces adjectives. "Why do near-misses go unreported at two of our sites?" produces something you can act on.
• Step 2: collect artifacts as evidence. Observe meetings. Read two years of promotion decisions, calibration outcomes, incentive rules, escalation records and meeting agendas. Visit the frontline on different shifts.
• Step 3: write down the espoused values: the values statement, the strategy, leaders' recent messages, the employer-brand promise.
• Step 4: list the contradictions between the two. Each one is a clue to an assumption.
• Step 5: test candidate assumptions in conversation, in small groups and one-to-one, across levels and sites. Ask for stories: "Tell me about the last time someone challenged a decision here. What happened next?" Read each assumption back as a plain sentence; recognition, often a laugh, means you are close. Hold the conversations in the language people think in: in a bilingual workforce, the Arabic version voiced on the shop floor may differ from the English one at head office, and it is the one that governs behaviour there.
• Step 6: sort and decide which assumptions help with the problem and which block it, then change the primary mechanisms that keep teaching the blocking ones.

Step 4 usually produces a table like this one, for a hypothetical company:

Why do surveys alone miss the third level? A survey asks people to report what they consciously think, and Schein described the deepest level as something that may be unspoken, hidden from view and even outside people's awareness. Surveys read espoused values and reported practices well, and assumptions only indirectly. They are still worth running, because they show at scale which units or cohorts have the largest gaps, and so where to send the interviewers. Our comparison of culture assessment tools covers the instruments, and measuring culture without guesswork covers the approach.

How does Schein's model compare with OCAI and Denison?

They answer different questions. The OCAI and the Denison survey turn culture into a profile you can compare across units and years; Schein's model explains why the profile looks the way it does.

The strongest diagnoses combine them. An OCAI result showing that people want less hierarchy is an espoused preference. Interviews built on Schein's levels tell you which assumption keeps the hierarchy in place, and which primary mechanism keeps teaching it.

What are the limits of Schein's model?

• It is a snapshot of something that moves. Mary Jo Hatch (1993) argued that the model leaves gaps in understanding culture as symbols and processes, and proposed a "cultural dynamics" model of manifestation, realisation, symbolisation and interpretation. Schein addressed this kind of criticism in 2015: a purely emergent view, he wrote, could not explain how stable organisations are or how hard culture is to change, while the dynamic view could be built into his structure.
• "Shared" is something to test. Schein said organisations with strong subcultures should be treated as multi-cultural systems and, citing Joanne Martin, that whether they have one organisational culture at all is an empirical question. He came to see occupation as a stronger driver of behaviour than country or company: to understand a hospital, he wrote, you must understand the subcultures of medicine, nursing and administration. In multi-site workforces, read results by cohort — head office and frontline, long-serving and new, by nationality and language — before reading the average.
• Culture work can become control. Jana Costas and Gideon Kunda (2015) argue that the subtler forms of culture management common today are an organised effort to shape employees' behaviour, experience and even sense of self, and that when employees see this, the commonest response is cynicism. A diagnosis done to people rather than with them confirms the suspicion.
• It does not produce a number. There is no score, benchmark or trend line, and findings are interpretations that depend on the interviewer. That is why practitioners pair it with a survey.

At GoldinKollar our culture work in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman and Qatar combines the two approaches. Persona Quest, our scenario-based diagnostic mapped to the OCAI, shows current versus desired culture by unit and role; a culture audit — leadership interviews, focus groups in Arabic and English, and a review of the records that govern behaviour, such as promotion decisions — explains the gaps.

Frequently asked questions

Is Schein's model a pyramid or an iceberg?

Neither shape is essential to the model. Schein describes three levels running from visible to hidden, and other writers often draw them as a pyramid, an onion or an iceberg. The iceberg makes the useful point that most of what steers behaviour sits below the waterline. A pyramid can mislead if it makes assumptions look like the small part: they are the foundation.

Who was Edgar Schein?

A social psychologist who taught at MIT Sloan for forty years and became its Society of Sloan Fellows professor of management emeritus. Born in Zurich in 1928, he died in January 2023, aged 94. Beyond culture, his work covered process consultation, humble inquiry, career anchors and coercive persuasion. Many of his later books were written with his son, Peter Schein.

Where can I read Organizational Culture and Leadership?

The book went through five editions between 1985 and 2017; the fifth (Wiley, 2017, with Peter Schein) is sold in print and as an e-book, and a university or company library is the easiest place to borrow it. "Free PDF" sites often carry unauthorised copies. For a short account in Schein's own words, read his open-access 2015 essay in the Journal of Business Anthropology.

Does Schein's model apply to national or team culture?

Yes. Schein treated culture as a property of any group with enough shared experience: a nation, an organisation, an occupation or a team. He argued that occupation often shapes behaviour more than country or company. Before blaming national culture for friction between engineers and sales in a global team, check whether you are looking at two occupational cultures.

How is Schein's model different from Hofstede's?

Geert Hofstede and colleagues studied organisational cultures across 20 units in 10 organisations in Denmark and the Netherlands (1990) and found that they differed mainly in everyday practices, on six dimensions such as process- versus results-oriented. Schein places the essence of culture deeper, in assumptions. The two fit together: practices are artifacts, and Schein asks what holds them in place.

Can basic underlying assumptions be changed?

Slowly and indirectly. Schein preferred the word evolve: "Elements of culture can change, but the deeper levels can only evolve." An assumption shifts when people repeatedly see a new way of working succeed, which happens when leaders change what they pay attention to, fund, reward and promote. Announcing a new assumption changes nothing.

Sources

• Schein, E.H. with Schein, P. (2017), Organizational Culture and Leadership, 5th edition, Wiley. oreilly.com
• Schein, E.H. (2015), "Some thoughts about the uses and misuses of the concept of culture", in "Opinions: all about culture", Journal of Business Anthropology 4(1), 106–150. rauli.cbs.dk
• Costas, J. and Kunda, G. (2015), "When I hear the word culture... I reach for my gun", in "Opinions: all about culture", Journal of Business Anthropology 4(1), 106–150. rauli.cbs.dk
• Hatch, M.J. (1993), "The dynamics of organizational culture", Academy of Management Review 18(4), 657–693. doi.org
• Wong, M.M.L. (undated), "The culture of Japanese work organization in Hong Kong: a case study of Yaohan and Seicho-no-ie", International Research Center for Japanese Studies repository, quoting Schein (1985) on primary and secondary mechanisms. nichibun.repo.nii.ac.jp
• Hitch, C. (2013), "How leaders use culture in their organizations to reinforce areas of emphasis", Shelton Leadership Center, NC State University, summarising Schein's The Corporate Culture Survival Guide. sheltonleadershipcenter.wordpress.ncsu.edu
• Dvorak, N. and Nelson, B. (2016), "Few employees believe in their company's values", Gallup. gallup.com
• Cameron, K.S. and Quinn, R.E. (2011), Diagnosing and Changing Organizational Culture, 3rd edition, Jossey-Bass. oreilly.com
• Denison, D.R. and Mishra, A.K. (1995), "Toward a theory of organizational culture and effectiveness", Organization Science 6(2), 204–223. doi.org
• Hofstede, G., Neuijen, B., Ohayv, D.D. and Sanders, G. (1990), "Measuring organizational cultures: a qualitative and quantitative study across twenty cases", Administrative Science Quarterly 35(2), 286–316. doi.org
• MIT Sloan School of Management (2024), "Sloan Fellow celebrates work of Edgar Schein in new book", MIT Sloan. mitsloan.mit.edu
• Schein, P. (2023), "Edgar H. Schein: a great life", Organizational Culture and Leadership Institute. scheinocli.org