Culture Framework: Building Organizational Success

A culture framework outlines essential factors shaping a company’s culture, including purpose, vision, principles, and goals. Building a purposeful culture ensures alignment, boosts performance, and supports recruiting, engaging, and retaining top talent.

By Brad Nakase, Attorney

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Table of Contents

1. What is the purpose of a culture framework?

2. What’s the point of a culture framework?

3. What are the various cultural frameworks?

What is the purpose of a culture framework?

A culture framework, often called a culture model, is an outline of the major factors that will determine the culture of a company. A company’s culture framework will often consist of the following:

Purpose
Mission
Vision
Core Principles
Rules
Goals
Routines and Regulations
Strategies

With the use of a framework, a business can consciously establish the culture that will achieve its goals.

What’s the point of a culture framework?

An organizational culture framework can serve as a starting point for a conversation about culture, as well as a guide for outlining the necessary actions to transform the current culture. Additionally, it can help your company’s culture become more real, turning it from an idea into something that can be observed and used.

Any company’s long-term success depends on its culture just as much as its strategy. To make matters worse, a lot of businesses don’t pay enough attention to their culture, so it grows on its own and can end up being different from what the leadership desires.

Recruiting, engaging, and retaining top talent that shares the company’s values and vision and can help achieve organizational goals can be very challenging in an environment with a hostile culture.

What are the various cultural frameworks?

Here are four of the most common models of cultural frameworks:

The Framework of Competing Values

Robert Quinn and John Rohrbaugh developed this model in 1983 to assist businesses in identifying the internal factors that encourage or discourage specific actions. Organizations can get insight into the ways in which culture affects performance and effectiveness by using this framework.

When aiming for efficiency gains, businesses must cope with two factors. The first is the importance of focus; some businesses do better when they center their efforts on internal operations, while others do better when they keep their attention on the outside world. Stability is the second factor; certain companies are efficient because they are versatile and responsive, while others are efficient because they are highly controlled and consistent.

According to Cameron and Quinn, there are four distinct kinds of company culture:

An adhocracy culture is one that is entrepreneurial, active, and results-oriented.
Clan culture is the amiable, people-focused Collaborate Culture.
The Control Culture, which is process-oriented and strictly hierarchical.
The market culture is characterized by a focus on results and a healthy dose of competition.

Methodology for Organizational Culture: The McKinsey 7S Model

There are seven components, both tangible and intangible, that make up this model, and they are all essential for a company’s culture to thrive:

It’s easy to map hard things like strategy, structure, and processes. Because they are in a perpetual state of change, “soft” components such as shared values, style, personnel, and abilities are more difficult to pin down. Things that are softer have a bigger effect on the business.

It is possible to visualize all seven components and use them to forecast how a change might play out. What impact, for instance, would a change in approach have on output? What kinds of changes might a team expect as a result of technological upgrades?

The cultural iceberg model: A corporate culture framework

Edgar Schein’s research served as the foundation for this paradigm. The model looks like an iceberg in that it has parts that can be seen and parts that can’t be seen. Included in the visible part are the goals, objectives, policies, and public presentations of a corporation. The greater and more significant aspect of every company’s culture is its hidden component, which includes unspoken norms, interpersonal dynamics, personnel requirements, and status.

By addressing the unseen factors and finding the answers to questions like “What are the needs of our employees and how is our business currently operating?” this model can help a company mold its culture. We can find out what people want by conducting surveys and interviews; then we can make the necessary adjustments.

The Hofstede model of corporate culture

Hofstede’s paradigm resembles an onion, with four separate layers for expressing culture: rituals, values, symbols, and heroes. Although this model is useful for gaining insight into the factors that influence your company’s culture, it could be challenging to use it to formulate a strategy. Hence, this strategy is ideal for new businesses and startups that are just starting out in terms of culture creation.

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