Being Specific About Culture

A 2013 global report on organizational culture from Strategy& (formerly Booz & Company) shows that 84% of senior managers across various sectors believe that culture is important to business success. However, 45% feel their firm’s culture is not being managed effectively, and 51% think their firm’s culture requires a major overhaul. How can something leaders say is important need so much fixing?

Perhaps one culprit lies in the difficulty of defining and working with culture. The construct lacks a universal definition, so people use the term to refer to a wide range of aspects of organizational life. The word “construct” has different meanings depending on the field of study. In the context of “culture,” we are referring to the psychological definition rather than the philosophical one. Philosophers define a “construct” as a hypothetical object whose existence depends on a person's mind. Psychologists, on the other hand, use the term to describe a domain of behaviors, which we believe is most useful for organizational leaders.

Working from the psychological meaning of construct, we encourage leaders who want to see a culture change in their organizations to be specific about the behaviors they want to change. This makes the construct less subjective and more actionable. Merely using the “culture” word conveys little concrete meaning in terms that people can understand.