Published on: July 22, 2026 at 11:25 am
Leaders need to pay attention to shaping their organization’s culture—its values, norms, attitudes, practices, and beliefs that shape how an organization operates—to support the organization’s strategy and contribute to its successful execution.
Academy of Management Scholars Jennifer Chatman of the University of California, Berkeley, and Glenn Carroll of Stanford University, the authors of Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Myths, say cultures often develop through the interactions of workers, but leaders can have the greatest influence on company culture by using a set of tools that research has identified as being helpful.
“No matter what, a culture is going to form—it will evolve and emerge from the interactions that people have over time and the way people respond to various organizational events,” Chatman said. “So even if leaders totally punt on it and don’t ever think about culture in a deliberate way, there’s still a culture—it just hasn’t been linked to the strategy, so it’s probably not very unified, and it may not be very adaptive over time.
“All three of those qualities—a culture that is strategically relevant, strong, and adaptive—are essential for the company to succeed,” she said. “Leaders have a significant influence on the culture by deliberately using the relevant tools.”
Carroll said that leaders need to use what he calls managerial “levers” to build strong cultures.
“First they need to agree on the values and norms they want to instill and cultivate,” Carroll said. “Then they need to develop communication procedures and training programs to get the rest of the organization on the same page.
“And then they need to make sure incentives are aligned—salaries, promotions, and so on,” he said. “Those are the top three levers.
“There are many others, such as changing the profile of the people you hire, and using the incentive of long-term employment to recruit influential employees as informal leaders.”
Chatman and Carroll cited Southwest Airlines, one of the first low-cost airlines, as an example of how strategy comes first, but culture makes it work.
“Their strategy was to turn the planes around faster than anyone else in the industry and get 12 hours of utilization out of each plane per day instead of nine, which was the industry average,” Chatman said. “If you’re a low-cost airline, that’s going to make a huge difference; it’s not a logistics play, it’s a mindset.
“Everyone pitches in to turn the planes around quickly, no matter what their job is—even the union workers who usually put bright lines around job descriptions,” he said. “Southwest was so persistent in helping people share in the success of the company that they trusted the organization.
“The cultural principles were all about teamwork at the gate, so everybody would do everything they needed to turn the plane around and get people on board on time—including the pilots!”
