We’re Thinking About Organizational Culture All Wrong; Harvard Business Review, January 6, 2017

John Traphagan, Harvard Business Review; 

We’re Thinking About Organizational Culture All Wrong

"Some research has found that rather than making everyone feel included, praising diversity can make some people feel singled out or threatened. It’s not simple.

And this brings us to an important point: The attempt to unify an organization by creating a “culture” is ultimately an exercise of power. People will react to that expression of power in different ways depending on the extent to which the values associated with the organizational culture resonate with their personal beliefs.

Fundamentally, a culture is not a set of (marginally) shared values; it’s a web of power relationships in which people are embedded and that they use to meet both personal and collective goals but that can also restrict their ability to achieve goals. Those power relationships can function to pull people together, but they also can pull them apart because they are the product of differential access to resources. And differences in power influence how we respond to and think about values espoused as being shared by members of a group.

Reliance on culture as a way to create unity can mislead those in positions of power into thinking that the core values expressed by the organization are actually uncritically accepted by employees."