One of the people profession’s fundamental roles is organising and coordinating the workforce to deliver value and success. HR systems and processes are part of this, but on their own are not enough for an organisation to make real progress. Taking inclusion and diversity as an example, research indicates that an organisation that fails to value difference, or enables some groups but not others to progress, is unlikely to see positive change, despite having policies in place. Workplace norms, values and behaviours, traditions, perspectives and beliefs of individuals are also crucial. It’s these shared characteristics among people within the same organisation that create its culture.

There are many academic definitions of organisational culture, including Balogun and Johnson’s ‘the way we do things around here’. The influential psychologist Edgar Schein described three levels of organisational culture:

• artefacts that may reflect culture (for example, symbols and language) 
• norms and values about appropriate attitudes and behaviours (espoused or real) 
• underlying assumptions and beliefs (conscious or unconscious). 

This model is often represented as a hierarchical pyramid or an iceberg, with artefacts being the ‘visible’ aspects above the water line and norms and assumptions being the larger parts that lie beneath the surface. Schein proposed that organisational culture develops very slowly and is passed on or actively taught to people who join an organisation ‘as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel’.

Culture is an influential term and clearly resonates with people. It’s important because it relates to deep social or collective aspects of organisational life, which influence people’s experiences and behaviour. 

Nevertheless, it’s tricky to pin down as there isn’t clear agreement on what it means. Schein’s above definition is conceptual and complex; the underlying assumptions and beliefs are often invisible to the casual observer, while the ‘artefacts’ that reflect culture, such as symbols and language, can be interpreted in different ways. 

Measuring culture also comes with its challenges. While consultancy-based assessment tools exist, these are not backed up by strong evidence. This isn’t a surprise; putting the underlying assumptions or world views of your organisation into words is extremely challenging. Schein’s suggestion that culture should be measured through ethnography, involving observing and talking to people in their natural environment, is bold, but frankly not feasible for employers who want to quickly identify how to improve behaviour at work.

All this leaves us struggling to leverage culture in practice. The reality of organisational culture never lives up to its rhetoric. In being difficult to continually assess, it is almost impossible to actively change. Leaders and people professionals should focus on specific aspects of employee behaviour – or ‘organisational climate’ – to more readily enact change. 

By contrast, organisational climate is a less popular term among business leaders, but is recognised by research as much clearer and actionable than organisational culture.

An organisational climate is widely defined as the meaning people attach to certain features of the work setting. It’s the feeling or atmosphere people have in an organisation, either day-to-day or more generally. The way an individual understands their workplace guides their behaviour. Creating an organisational climate of inclusion, for example, requires employees to attach meaning to their experience of work. Only when there’s a shared belief that all employees are respected, valued and allowed to be themselves, will an organisation have a truly inclusive climate. So organisational climate can be described as the perceptions and meanings people give to the culture in which they work.

Clearly, culture and climate are linked; culture resonates but only gets us so far, whereas climate helps us understand behaviour more clearly and have a better chance at shaping it. 

One reason for this is that climate is much more specific than culture in that it relates to particular topic areas. Rather than looking at an organisation’s climate holistically, researchers usually focus on dimensions of organisational climate, relating to specific areas of behaviour. The most established dimensions of climate are safety climate, innovation climate, learning climate, ethical climate and inclusion climate.

Alongside inclusion climate mentioned above, one well-established dimension of organisational climate is safety climate. This concerns employees’ perceptions that an organisation’s policies and practices contribute to workplace safety. A safety climate also focuses on what influences the safety of behaviour, for example whether an organisation encourages learning from mistakes or favours punishment. Safety climate is an important predictor of outcomes such as psychological wellbeing, safety motivation and safety compliance (such as helping colleagues resolve safety problems).

Safety climate has a validated measure, including items such as:

• ‘We who work here have confidence in the management’s ability to deal with safety.’
• ‘Management looks for causes, not guilty persons, when an accident occurs.’
• ‘We who work here accept dangerous behaviour as long as there are no accidents.’

Research also highlights clear drives of safety climate, for example job demands, manager behaviour and trust. 

This example indicates how dimensions of organisational climate are linked to clear behaviours and policies, allowing us to make actionable change in order to positively influence our work climates.

While each dimension of climate will require different action, some aspects of working life are particularly influential in driving more than one dimension. The strongest drivers are leadership, team dynamics, job design and organisational policies, procedures and practices. 

Leaders

Leaders are essential in influencing a positive organisational climate. They are key to establishing strategic goals and relevant outcomes depending on which dimension of climate they wish to address, so a key starting point is to develop a clear, shared vision with ambitious goals that employees buy into. 

Leaders should also shape employees’ behaviour through acting as role models themselves. For example, a manager who goes the extra mile to follow safety rules sets an example for others, thus increasing safety climate.

Different leaderships influence different dimensions of organisational climate. Transformational leadership, where a leader strives to inspire and empower their people, contributes to innovation and safety climate. Transactional leadership, where leaders organise employees and use reward and punishment to leverage their performance, is more effective at strengthening ethical climate. So leaders should be aware of their natural styles and seek to adapt this for different situations.

Team dynamics

Creating open teams who communicate and collaborate effectively with each other is key to a positive climate. Leaders should establish avenues for the flow of information to benefit everyone in the team. One a more personal note, team members need to have psychological safety – feeling they can express themselves, ask questions, share ideas and talk about mistakes without fear of punishment or judgement. Team leaders should again role-model this behaviour to encourage honesty at work. 

Job design

Especially important in building a climate of safety is ensuring job demands, such as workload and emotional pressures, do not outweigh the available resources, for example autonomy, role clarity and support. A greater availability of job resources is likely not only to reduce stress and cutting corners, but to stimulate innovation by encouraging risk-taking and experimentation. 

Policies, procedures and practices

Often placed as a counter to organisational culture, policies and procedures, or ‘rules’, are sometimes seen as inadequate to bring about change. However, in reality, respected and lived policies and procedures can help actively shape organisational climate. For example, safety and ethical climates both emphasise the importance of compliance with rules, while an inclusion climate requires actions to increase diversity in practices such as recruitment, development and promotion.

Looking ahead

Organisational culture continues to be a popular label that resonates strongly with many people. Culture is still relevant and important to organisational life, but, owing to unclear definitions and poorly established measures, it is hard to gain traction in practice.

Organisational climate, on the other hand, provides a more practical focus. With its centre on observed behaviour, it is easier to understand and reliably measure, and can be changed through management action. HR, L&D and OD experts should develop their understanding of the different dimensions of organisational climate, how these relate to certain behaviours and how they can be shaped. 

Books and reports

Barends, E., Rousseau, D., Wietrak, E. and Gifford, J. (2022) Organisational climate: an evidence review. Scientific summary. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. 

Ehrhart, M.G. and Schneider, B. (2016) Organizational climate and culture In Oxford research encyclopedias: psychology. Oxford: The University Press.

Ehrhart, M.R., Schneider, B and Macey, W.H. (2014) Organizational climate and culture: an introduction to theory, research and practice. New York: Routledge.

Gifford, J. and Wietrak, E. (2022) Organisational culture and climate: an evidence review. Practice summary and recommendations. London: Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development.

Ostroff, C., Kinicki, A. J., and Muhammad, R. S. (2013). Organizational culture and climate. In Schmitt, N.W., Highhouse, S. and Weiner, I.B. (eds) Handbook of psychology: industrial and organizational psychology. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. (pp643-676).

PricewaterhouseCoopers. Where organizational culture is headed (2018 global survey). PwC website.

Schein, E.H. and Schein, P. (2016) Organizational culture and leadership. 5th ed. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. 

Journal articles

A new era for culture, change and leadership: a conversation between Edgar H. Schein and Peter A. Schein. (2019) MIT Sloan Management Review. Vol 60, No 4, Summer. pp52-58.

Balogun, J. and Johnson, G. (2004) Organizational restructuring and middle manager sensemaking. Academy of Management Journal. Vol 47, No 4. pp523-549.

Iljins, J., Skvarciany, V. and Gaile-Sarkane, E. (2015) Impact of organizational culture on organizational climate during the process of change. Procedia – Social and Behavioural Sciences. Vol 213, December. Pp944-950.

Leetaru, L. (2019) The wrong ways to strengthen culture. Harvard Business Review. Vol 97, No 4, July/August. pp21-24.

Lynn, B. (2023) Are you talking about organizational culture or climate? NeuroLeadership Institute Latest from the Lab Blog [blog]16th February. 

Rehn, A. (2019) Has your organisation turned into a monoculture? People Management (online). 5 July.

Schneider, B., Ehrhart, M.G. and Macey, W.H. (2013) Organizational climate and culture. Annual Review of Psychology. Vol 64, January. pp.361-388.

Shaw, J. (2019) How businesses can bounce back after a challenging period. People Management (online). 26 June.

CIPD members can use our online journals to find articles from over 300 journal titles relevant to HR.

Members and People Management subscribers can see articles on the People Management website.