Magazine Spring 2024 Issue Research Feature

Building Culture From the Middle Out

Midlevel leaders are critical to fostering an organizational culture that’s healthy and vibrant.

Spencer Harrison and Kristie Rogers Reading Time: 15 min 

Topics

Permissions and PDF

Melinda Beck/theispot.com

We have asked thousands of executives from around the world the same simple question: “Who is responsible for culture in your organization?” Hands go up and, almost to a person, the response is, “Everyone.”

We then ask a follow-up: “If everyone is responsible for culture in your organization, what do you do to manage it?”

Hands go down. Gazes divert. The most common answers are uninspiring: “Keep an open-door policy.” “Provide good performance reviews.” “Check in with employees.” While each of these actions may be helpful, not one is specific to culture. They are simply generic management habits — that is, none are practices specific to translating a company’s unique set of values into a lived experience for the people who work there.

Organizational culture is the set of shared values that guide how work gets done. There used to be a debate about whether culture predicts high performance or whether high performance affords leaders a strong and cohesive culture. Evidence now overwhelmingly supports the former.1 But for a business to harness the power of culture, it needs midlevel leaders across the organization — the managers and team leaders — to go beyond believing that they are responsible for culture to actively building it.

Our research revealed that midlevel leaders often feel they need to endorse cultural norms rather than enrich them, by which we mean supporting expressions of cultural norms and values as they arise in smaller teams. We also identified key behaviors that managers at any level of an organization can embrace to become culture builders. Specifically, we found that the most successful midlevel leaders find ways to link the “big-C” culture of their organization — its official set of values — with the “small-c” culture that plays out in the narrower and vibrant daily patterns of interaction.

Topics

About the Authors

Spencer Harrison is a professor of organizational behavior at INSEAD. Kristie Rogers is an associate professor in management at the College of Business Administration at Marquette University and an associate editor at Academy of Management Review. The authors contributed equally to this article and are listed in alphabetical order.

References

1. C.A. Hartnell, A.Y. Ou, A.J. Kinicki, et al., “A Meta-Analytic Test of Organizational Culture’s Association With Elements of an Organization’s System and its Relative Predictive Validity on Organizational Outcomes,” Journal of Applied Psychology 104, no. 6 (June 2019): 832-850; C. Gartenberg, A. Prat, and G. Serafeim, “Corporate Purpose and Financial Performance,” Organization Science 30, no. 1 (January-February 2019): 1-18; and J. Pfeffer and J.F. Veiga, “Putting People First for Organizational Success,” Academy of Management Executive 13, no. 2 (May 1999): 37-48.

2. This labeling adopts the “big-C” and “small-c” distinction in societal culture between the institutional forces and features (big-C) and the subjective manifestations that come from day-to-day interactions with others (small-c). This distinction is also inspired by Heath and Sitkin’s article on big-B versus big-O considerations in research on organizations. See M.J. Bennett, “Intercultural Communication: A Current Perspective,” in “Basic Concepts of Intercultural Communication: Selected Readings,” ed. M.J. Bennett (Yarmouth, Maine: Intercultural Press, 1998), 1-20; and C. Heath and S.B. Sitkin, “Big-B Versus Big-O: What Is Organizational About Organizational Behavior?” Journal of Organizational Behavior 22, no. 1 (February 2001): 43-58.

3. J. Lina, “Most Employees Don’t Know Their Company’s Corporate Values,” Fond, April 11, 2018, www.fond.co; and “Stress-Testing Corporate Core Values in America,” Eagle Hill Consulting Survey on Core Values, 2016, eaglehillconsulting.com.

4. E.H. Schein, “Organizational Culture and Leadership” (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 1992). There is a classic distinction about a gap between espousing culture (what people say: “We believe in equality”) and enacting it (what people actually do: “We hire only one type of employee”). Big-C and small-c culture both include espousing (for example, mission statements versus stories) and enacting (for example, training programs versus experimenting). Hence, the insight here is not about a gap between talk and action, but it’s about how leaders translate the abstract elements of big-C culture into concrete experiences through small-c culture.

Tags:

Reprint #:

65322

More Like This

Add a comment

You must to post a comment.

First time here? Sign up for a free account: Comment on articles and get access to many more articles.

Comment (1)
Jan Johnson
The distinction between big-C and small-C is really important. My colleagues and I think of small-C as the unwritten rules a team or department will share with new hires over time (consciously or unconsciously) and can give managers clues about the relative strength of social cohesion between peers, or their perceptions of management. UR's like "Don't leave the office before the boss," or "Don't use all your vacation - it signals a lack of commitment," undermine qualities like Fairness, Authenticity, Interdependence and Belonging.