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Schein’s model of organisational culture

How can schein’s model of organisational culture improve people, teams, or organisational effectiveness?

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Contents

Every organisation has a culture – an unwritten set of norms and expectations about how people should behave.

Every organisation develops shared ways of interpreting and responding to its environment. Edgar Schein’s model helps explain why culture is visible in everyday behaviour yet difficult to diagnose or change: observable practices rest on deeper assumptions that members may no longer recognise as choices.

When to use it

Diagnose how culture shapes behaviour, decisions and belonging.

Investigate gaps between stated values and lived practice.

Prepare change, integration, leadership transition or organisational learning.

Avoid reducing culture to engagement scores, office design or slogans.

Origins

Organisational culture draws on anthropology, social psychology and earlier work on organisational climate and group dynamics. Edgar Schein, a long-serving MIT professor, integrated these traditions through research on careers, socialisation, leadership and groups. His 1985 book Organizational Culture and Leadership gave a defining account of culture and its relationship with leadership. Later models by Daniel Denison, Rob Goffee, Gareth Jones and others offered complementary ways to compare cultures.

What it is

Schein defines the culture of a group as shared basic assumptions learned while solving problems of external adaptation and internal integration. When those assumptions work well enough, members teach them to newcomers as the appropriate way to perceive, think and feel.

Culture can be examined at three levels:

Artefacts – visible and audible structures, practices, stories, language, routines and behaviour.

Espoused beliefs and values – the principles, strategies and explanations the organisation says guide it.

Basic underlying assumptions – taken-for-granted beliefs about reality, people, relationships, time, truth and success.

Artefacts are easy to observe and hard to interpret. Casual clothing, open offices or rituals may have different meanings in different groups. Espoused values explain what members claim is important, but enacted behaviour may contradict them. Basic assumptions are deeper and often tacit; because they feel obvious, members may struggle to articulate or challenge them.

The iceberg metaphor is useful if not taken literally: artefacts appear above the surface, while deeper assumptions provide the hidden logic. The levels interact rather than forming separate boxes.

How to use it

Schein’s model is primarily diagnostic. In his 1985 work, he recommends moving from observation towards progressively deeper interpretation:

visit and observe several settings, roles and decision moments;

note artefacts or processes that are surprising or puzzling;

ask insiders how these practices developed and what problem they solve;

identify stated beliefs and values, then look at how they are enacted;

examine inconsistencies, critical incidents, rewards and sanctions; and

form hypotheses about underlying assumptions and test them with diverse members.

Use interviews, observation, documents, meeting behaviour, resource allocation, promotion, conflict and stories about success or failure. Compare subcultures rather than assuming one organisation has one uniform culture. Include marginalised voices whose experience may contradict the dominant account.

For change, identify which shared assumption supports the current behaviour and what new experience could credibly challenge it. Leaders influence culture through what they attend to, reward, tolerate, recruit, promote and model. Values communication without changed systems will usually deepen cynicism.

Top practical tip

Treat every interpretation as a hypothesis. Ask why a visible practice makes sense to insiders, then test the answer against decisions, rewards, crises and the experiences of different subcultures.

Top pitfall

Do not equate organisational values with identical personal beliefs or claim that either is immutable. Culture change alters shared expectations and systems through repeated experience; coercing personal identity is neither necessary nor legitimate.