Essentials of Organizational Behavior, 14/e

Creating and Sustaining Culture

An organization’s culture doesn’t pop out of thin air, and once established it rarely fades away. What influences the creation of a culture? What reinforces and sustains it once in place?

How a Culture Begins

An organization’s customs, traditions, and general way of doing things are largely due to what it has done before and how successful it was in doing it. This leads us to the ultimate source of an organization’s culture: the founders.38 Founders have a vision of what the organization should be, and a firm’s initially small size makes it easy to impose that vision on all members.

Culture creation occurs in three ways.39 First, founders hire and keep only employees who think and feel the same way they do. Second, ...