Organizational Behavior, 17e

Creating and Sustaining Culture

1. 3 Identify the factors that create and sustain an organization’s 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.43 Founders have a vision of what the organization should be, and the firm’s initial small size makes it easy to impose that vision on all members.

Culture creation occurs in three ways.44 First, founders ...