What Is Organizational Culture

By Joe Newsum

Everyone Has a Definition. Here Is the One That Works.

Culture is the amalgamation of hundreds or thousands of individuals, their histories, their education, their experiences, colliding and layering on top of each other over time. Every person who walks through the door brings their previous bosses, the companies that shaped them, and the mental models formed over a lifetime. None of it gets checked at the door. It all accumulates into what you call the culture.

The residue of everything everyone brought with them, lightly nudged and largely left to chance.

That is why the common definitions fall short. Ask ten executives to define organizational culture and you will get ten versions of the same answer. The feeling you get in a company. The shared values and norms. One of my clients put it best: culture is the personality of the organization. It is my favorite of the answers, because it captures something true. Every organization does have a distinct personality, and you can feel it within an hour of walking in. But like the others, it describes culture from the outside. It tells you what culture feels like. It does not tell you what culture actually is, where it comes from, or how to change it.

This definition does all three. Organizational culture is the cumulative effect of how people think and behave. Every word is doing work, so let me take it apart. But first, it is worth being honest about the definitions this one is competing with.

The Textbook Definitions, and What They Miss

The academic standard comes from Edgar Schein, who described culture in three levels: the artifacts you can see, the espoused values the organization claims, and, underneath both, the shared basic assumptions people hold without ever discussing them. The business classic is simpler and older: culture is “the way we do things around here.” And the textbook version most people absorb somewhere along the way defines culture as the shared values, beliefs, and norms of an organization.

None of these is wrong. Schein’s deepest layer, the unspoken assumptions, is genuinely close to the truth, and “the way we do things around here” is a fine description of what culture feels like once it exists. But notice what all three have in common: they describe culture as an observer would. They tell you what culture is made of, or what it looks like from the outside. They do not hand you the mechanism. If culture is layers of assumptions, how do you change an assumption nobody says out loud? If culture is the way we do things, what do you actually pull on to change the way? The definitions describe the sediment. They say nothing about the river that deposited it.

That is what the cumulative-effect definition adds. It names the two moving parts you can actually work on, how people think and how people behave, and it tells you where all of it came from: accumulation. Schein’s hidden assumptions are simply thinking that was never made deliberate. The way we do things around here is simply behavior that accumulated until it felt like gravity. Define culture by its moving parts and, for the first time, you have a definition a builder can use.

How People Think

Every common definition of culture lands on behaviors. Behaviors are real. They are what you see, what you feel, what you can measure. But behaviors are downstream of something more fundamental that almost nobody talks about.

How we think drives how we behave.

How we think about our job. How we think about our manager. How we think about a customer complaint, a missed deadline, a difficult conversation, a performance review. Our mental models, our assumptions, our instinctive framing of situations, all of it happens before the behavior. It shapes the behavior. It determines the behavior.

And yet thinking never appears in the common definitions of culture. That is the central omission. If you want to change behavior, you have to get upstream of it, into the thinking. And the way into the thinking of many people at once, as the rest of this guide shows, is language.

And Behave

Behavior is where thinking becomes visible. It is the culture you can actually observe. Whether feedback flows freely or gets swallowed. Whether meetings produce decisions or defer them. Whether people raise problems early or bury them until they explode. You can walk into a company and read its behavior in an hour. What you are reading is the thinking underneath it.

The Cumulative Effect

This is where scale changes everything. All of those colliding histories and layered mental models mean no company has one culture. Every organization is a collection of overlapping subcultures, within functions, within teams, within how people run meetings and give feedback. The finance culture and the sales culture are genuinely different worlds. I have sat in executive team meetings and watched the head of sales and the head of operations talk past each other for an hour, not because they disagreed, but because they were operating from completely different mental models of how the business works.

The cumulative effect is what all of it adds up to, the aggregate of every individual’s thinking and behavior, across every subculture, compounding over time. In most organizations, nobody is managing that aggregate. It simply accumulates. Which means most cultures are not built at all. They are the residue of everything everyone brought with them. The culture is always accumulating. The only question is whether anyone is building it.

Leaders Are the Multiplier

One force shapes the cumulative effect more than any other.

I have seen a single leader transform the culture of a function just by asking better questions in meetings. I have seen a single leader poison an entire division by tolerating behavior that contradicted everything the company said it stood for. Leaders send cultural signals every single day, in how they run meetings, how they respond to bad news, how they treat people when the pressure is on. The only question is whether those signals are intentional. Most of the time they are not.

Think about the signals you sent yesterday, in your meetings, your reactions, what you let slide. Did you choose them?

Where the Values Fit

Notice what is missing from the definition. Values. That is deliberate. The shared values that feel genuinely lived, the personality that makes people proud to work there, these are real and worth chasing. But they are outputs. Trust is built when leaders consistently tell hard truths and keep their commitments, over years. The values are what you get when the thinking and the behavior are right. The full argument is in Company Values vs. Culture.

The Only Question That Matters

Organizational culture is the cumulative effect of how people think and behave, shaped by individual histories, layered by subcultures, and amplified by leaders.

That is what you are actually managing. And it distills the entire discipline of culture into a single question, the one I have spent my career working on:

Can you change the collective thinking of hundreds or thousands of people, on purpose?

You can, and it is more practical than it sounds. A culture stops being an accumulation the moment thinking becomes shared: everyone thinking deliberately about their work, their teammates, their customers, and their commitments, in ways that are consistent and aligned with where the organization needs to go. And the one tool that creates shared thinking at scale is shared language.

Understanding what culture is matters. What really matters is building one that performs. Read next: What Is a High Performance Culture.