Culture in Organisations

This module defines organisational culture, drawing on Edgar Schein's definition and the culture eats strategy for breakfast line popularised by Peters and Waterman. It shows how to read the culture you have, separating healthy from unhealthy patterns, subcultures from countercultures, and culture from climate and employer brand. Cases from Kerrier District Council and WD-40 support the evidence that culture drives performance and must be developed deliberately.

Positive does not mean nice, and strong does not mean healthy. This module draws on O'Reilly and Chatman's view of culture as social control, the Enron case, Sull, Sull and Zweig's five attributes of toxic culture, and Rousseau's psychological contract to show how cultures tip into harm. It then turns to the Great Place to Work model, recognition, fairness and voice, and the Timpson case.

Every model of culture is a lens that reveals some things and hides others. This module introduces Hofstede's dimensions, including Minkov's later additions, Handy's four culture types, and Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner's seven dilemmas. The Renault-Nissan alliance and Lenovo's acquisition of IBM's PC division show these models at work across borders, and the module closes with the pitfalls of careless or single-model use.

This module moves from describing culture towards diagnosing and measuring it. It covers Schein's three levels of artefacts, espoused values and underlying assumptions, including founder imprinting; Deal and Kennedy's four types built on risk and feedback speed; Cameron and Quinn's Competing Values Framework; and Denison's four traits linked to performance. It closes with a timeline of seven models and a guide to choosing the right lens.

The Cultural Web, developed by Johnson and Scholes, is built for diagnosis rather than comparison. This module works through its six elements, stories, symbols, power structures, organisational structures, control systems, and rituals and routines, and shows how together they protect a central paradigm. Nucor Steel and Lehman Brothers show the same web explaining opposite outcomes, with practical guidance on running a workshop and mapping cultures around a merger.

Structure and process are never neutral scaffolding: they are culture written down as an organisation chart, an approval form or a seating plan. This module uses Conway's Law and the McKinsey 7S framework to show how structure and culture shape each other, treats process design, matrix structures, space and digital tools as culture decisions, and explores Netflix, board governance and local government's dual political and officer structure.

Culture is decided by precedent, one decision at a time. This module sets out Schein's primary embedding mechanisms, ways to measure culture through pulse surveys and leading indicators, and the evidence on change that sticks by building on existing pockets of desired behaviour. It then turns to mergers, contrasting Gerstner's turnaround at IBM with the HP and Compaq clash, and closes with a culture due diligence checklist.

Psychological safety is not comfort; it is whether bad news can travel while there is still time to act. This module draws on Edmondson's three moves, Coyle's three skills and belonging cues, a standards and safety matrix, Sutton on the cost of one difficult senior person, and Darley and Latane's bystander effect. Pixar's Braintrust and Bridgewater's radical transparency are contrasted, and a three question safety audit follows.

The office was never the culture; it was simply where culture happened by accident. This module reads the Agile Manifesto as a set of cultural bets, then examines what remote and hybrid working remove, from hallway conversation to belonging cues. GitLab and Automattic show culture rebuilt on purpose, and the module addresses proximity bias, hybrid's two-tier risk, asynchronous communication, deliberate redesign and remote onboarding.

Volkswagen's Dieselgate, the Wells Fargo cross-selling scandal, Theranos and Uber under Kalanick span four industries but share one shape: aggressive targets weakly checked, a personal cost to raising concerns, and problems that started small and compounded. Each case is read through the Cultural Web, Schein, psychological safety and Sull and Sull, alongside Asch and Milgram on why decent people go along and how boards can hear warnings earlier.

Feedback habits and decision styles that feel natural are often deeply cultural. This module works through Erin Meyer's eight Culture Map scales for reading cross-national difference, then turns to the distinct pressures on culture in local government, the voluntary and third sector, and multinational NGOs. A comparison of two Welsh councils and a housing association merger composite show what crosses borders and sectors, with practical checks for partnerships.

This capstone introduces no new theory. It applies frameworks from across the programme, including the Cultural Web, Schein's three levels, psychological safety, the Competing Values Framework and Denison, to four organisations at very different scales: NASA and the normalisation of deviance, the Ritz-Carlton, a composite local government reorganisation, and Basecamp. It closes with a combined self-assessment and the new starter test.