Ten Common Types of Corporate Cultures, and the People Who Make Them Great

What kind of corporate culture does your organization have? Is it the culture your organization needs to thrive?

A bad culture can overwhelm a great business strategy. However, building a great culture should start with your strategy. And leaders should ask themselves what the organization must be good at for strategy to succeed. 

If innovation and expansion into new markets are critical to success, then a culture of innovation, learning, and risk taking is appropriate. If the organization is focused on succeeding in a highly competitive mature market, then a culture that encourages efficiency, customer focus, and quality may be better suited for sustained success.

Use the chart below—sourced from i4cp’s ongoing Culture Renovation® research—to determine the three or four culture types that will enable your organization’s strategy to work.

Are your leaders modeling the necessary behaviors?

i4cp research shows that one of the most impactful ways to shape culture is for the CEO, senior executives, and mid-level managers to consistently model the behaviors the organization wants to see.

Those behaviors are reinforced every day through both overt and subtle actions by organizational leaders (at all levels). Unless regularly embodied by leaders, values won’t be disseminated throughout the organization and emulated by the workforce, causing strategy and culture to be misaligned. But what behaviors are the right ones—and how do you know?

Once you have chosen the culture type that will best support the organization’s strategy, consider the behavioral traits associated with each. Are your leaders modeling behaviors like these? If not, an opportunity to create a high-performance culture is being missed.

Putting culture research into action

We worked with an i4cp member company recently that came to us with the following challenge: After years of growth through acquisitions, they needed a common culture that would drive collaboration, efficiency, and customer focus.

Leveraging i4cp’s culture health research, we helped them identify their desired culture state, and then deployed our Culture Health Assessment—based on the largest study of organizational culture ever conducted—to identify if their 12,000 leaders and employees were living the traits that support their desired culture.

Next steps

The data is clear: leader behaviors impact culture, and culture impacts an organization’s ability to execute its strategy. Use the list of common culture types above to begin testing the alignment of your organization’s culture to the leadership and talent traits needed.

Every company is unique—contact us if you would like a more in-depth assessment or to discuss how culture renovations succeed (and what causes them to fail).

Need help with your culture initiatives? Learn more about our culture advisory services.

The Toxic 9: Culture Traits that Hurt Business Performance. On a related note, read this article on the research-identified traits that are dangerous to any culture.