Part 1: What Do We Actually Mean by Culture?

At work, we talk about culture as if it is obvious, powerful, and always worth investing in. This series takes a more evidence-based look at those assumptions. It is for leaders, HR, and OD practitioners who are being asked to “fix the culture” or “build a high-performance culture” and want to be more precise. Across the series, the aim is to help you make better decisions about when to work on “culture”, when to work on systems and structures, and how to connect the two in practice.
Introduction

I have written about culture before.
I have facilitated culture conversations.
I have believed culture was a primary lever of organisational success.

But reading the evidence more closely has unsettled me.

We talk about culture as if it is obvious. As if everyone knows what it is. As if it can be strengthened, shifted, or engineered with enough intention.

Yet when you step into the research, certainty fades.

Before we ask whether culture improves performance, perhaps we need to ask a more basic question:

What exactly do we mean by culture?
And if you are a leader, HR, or OD practitioner, an equally practical question follows:

When you say “culture” at work, what specific behaviours and system signals are you actually pointing at?

The Science

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) conducted a rapid evidence assessment examining the link between organisational culture and performance.

Their findings are sobering:

• There is no consensus definition of organisational culture.
• Multiple competing schools of thought exist.
• Scholars disagree on whether culture is something an organisation is or something it has.

Two dominant approaches stand out:

1. Schein’s model
Culture is a pattern of shared underlying assumptions, values, and beliefs that guide behaviour. It is deep, embedded, and difficult to change.

2. Traits–strength models
Culture is a profile of measurable characteristics (for example clan, market, hierarchy, adhocracy) assessed via surveys such as Competing Values Framework (OCAI), Denison Organisational Culture Survey (DOCS), Organisational Culture Inventory (OCI) or Organisational Culture Profile (OCP).

The problem is not that these models exist. The problem is that they are conceptually different. If scholars cannot agree what culture is, measurement becomes unstable.

And when measurement is unstable, management becomes uncertain.

Key Findings

The CIPD review highlights several important issues:

• Over 70 diagnostic instruments exist for assessing culture.
• Many show predictive validity but lack construct validity.
• In some cases, tools originally designed to measure effectiveness have been relabelled as culture instruments.
• Studies often rely on cross-sectional surveys and self-report data.

Put simply: we may be correlating performance with something called culture without being entirely clear what that “something” is.

This does not mean culture is imaginary.
It does mean it is conceptually fragmented.

And that fragmentation matters.

What Does This Mean in Practice?

In HR, we routinely:

• Commission culture surveys.
• Diagnose cultural strengths and weaknesses.
• Design culture change initiatives.
• Align recruitment and reward with “our culture”.

But if the construct itself lacks clarity, we must pause.

When we say:
“We have a high-performance culture.”

What are we actually referring to?

• Decision speed?
• Collaboration norms?
• Risk tolerance?
• Leadership behaviour?
• Incentive design?
• Psychological safety?

If different leaders are imagining different things, culture becomes a container word.
And container words can obscure more than they clarify.

Perhaps the more useful move is not to abandon culture, but to disaggregate it.

Instead of asking:
“How do we strengthen our culture?”
Ask:

• Which behaviours are stabilised?
• Which behaviours are rewarded?
• Which behaviours are tolerated?
• Which behaviours are costly?

That shift moves us from abstraction to mechanism.

If You’re a Leader or HR Practitioner, Try This Week

To make this concrete, here are a few small experiments you can run:

1. Clarify the picture behind the word “culture”.
   In your next leadership or HR meeting, ask each person to write down, in one sentence, what they mean when they say “our culture”. Compare the answers. Notice where they diverge.
2. Translate slogans into observable behaviour.
   Take one existing culture statement (for example, “We have a high-performance culture” or “We value collaboration”) and rewrite it as concrete behaviour:
   • “We have a high-performance culture” → “We commit to clear goals, review progress weekly, and address underperformance within one month.”
   • “We value collaboration” → “Major cross-team decisions involve A and B before sign-off.”
3. Name the system signals, not just the vibes.
   For one team or function, list three recent decisions about hiring, promotion, reward, or workload. Ask: “What do these decisions signal is really valued here?”
4. Audit a phrase you use often.
   If you frequently describe your organisation as “innovative”, “customer-centric”, or “high trust”, write down:
   • What behaviours are consistently rewarded that justify this label?
   • What behaviours are consistently penalised that would contradict it?

These actions do not solve culture.
But they make your use of the word “culture” more precise, and your levers more visible.

A Quote to Reflect On
“There is no consensus of what ‘organisational culture’ entails.”
— Organisational Culture and Performance: An Evidence Review

A Question to Reflect On
When you talk about culture in your organisation, are you describing shared assumptions, measurable traits, or simply patterns of behaviour?

If your honest answer is “I’m not sure”, your next step may not be another culture initiative. It may be a clearer shared definition.

Further Reading

• Barends, E. & Rousseau, D. (2022). Organisational culture and performance: An evidence review. CIPD
• Chatman, J. & O’Reilly, C. (2016). Paradigm lost: reinvigorating the study of organisational culture.
• Schneider, B., Ehrhart, M., & Macey, W. (2013). Organisational climate and culture.

Part 2: The myth of inevitable decline – and the HR policies that quietly reinforce it
​
One of the most enduring assumptions about cognitive decline is that it is inevitable: ageing equals decline, decline equals limitation, limitation equals withdrawal. Yet both Ellen Langer’s work and the Lancet Commission’s life course model suggest a different story: decline is neither uniform nor fixed, and context matters.

If culture shapes behaviour, policy shapes expectation. Many organisational systems are quietly built on assumptions about fragility and diminishing capability that the science does not support.

The science, briefly recapped
The Lancet Commission highlights that cognitive risk factors accumulate through everyday exposure to stress, inactivity, isolation, and limited learning, many of which are influenced by working conditions. At the same time, risk trajectories remain changeable throughout life, undermining the idea that decline is a one-way path.

Langer’s research adds the psychological dimension: when people are treated as capable, choiceful, and engaged, outcomes improve; when systems signal fragility, limitation, or passivity, outcomes deteriorate. Workplaces operationalise these signals not only through culture, but through HR policy.
So what myths about cognition are embedded in the way work is formalised?

Myth one: cognitive decline is an age issue
This myth appears when development investment drops after a certain career stage, or when mid-career roles become narrower rather than richer. Organisational research shows that training and development investment often peaks early in careers and declines sharply after mid-career, based more on assumptions about return on investment than on evidence of learning capacity.
Policy shifts could include:

• Setting explicit expectations that development budgets and stretch opportunities are distributed across career stages, not front-loaded.
• Designing mid- and late-career roles that add complexity and discretion rather than only span and oversight.

Reflective prompt: If you plotted development spend by age band in your organisation, what story would it tell?

Myth two: predictability is always protective
This belief is often embedded in rigid role profiles, static job families, and promotion systems that reward replication over learning. Static roles are easier to design, benchmark, and control, yet job design research shows that when predictability dominates, roles can drift into “passive jobs” (low demand and low control), whereas “active jobs”, which combine structure with discretion, better sustain learning and cognitive health over time.
Policy shifts could include:

• Building in periodic role refresh cycles that explicitly add problem-solving, experimentation, or mentoring components.
• Reviewing promotion criteria for signals that prize stability over adaptive learning and reframing them to value judgement, experimentation, and informed risk-taking.

Reflective prompt: Where in your job architecture have roles become easier to administer than to grow in?

Myth three: wellbeing sits outside core people processes
This myth appears when health, workload, and learning are treated as separate from performance, reward, and progression. A substantial body of research shows that organisations frequently incentivise overwork, speed, and constant availability, even while promoting wellbeing rhetorically. When performance ratings and promotion decisions favour those who tolerate unsustainable load, wellbeing becomes performative rather than genuinely protective.
Policy shifts could include:

• Integrating workload sustainability and recovery practices into performance conversations and leadership expectations.
• Auditing reward and recognition mechanisms for signals that equate value with visible overextension or constant availability.

Reflective prompt: If people only watched who gets promoted and rewarded, what would they infer about the cognitive cost of success here?

From myth to design choice
If organisations took cognitive health seriously as a long-term outcome, some HR policy choices might look different. For example:

• Career frameworks that encourage movement, secondments, and skill renewal rather than linear progression alone.
• Performance systems that value judgement, learning, and adaptation, not just delivery under pressure.
• Capability models that evolve with roles, designing jobs for tomorrow’s expectations rather than recruiting only for yesterday’s skills.
• Work environment standards that treat sound, light, and sensory load as cognitive factors, not merely facilities issues.​

None of these require radical reinvention; they require a shift in what organisations see as legitimate people risks and a willingness to see cognition as an organisational outcome, not just an individual trait.

A quote to reflect on
“Much of what we call decline is simply the result of how situations are framed.”
Ellen Langer.

A question to reflect on
What assumptions about capability, ageing, and limitation are embedded in your HR policies, not just your culture?

Further reading

• Livingston et al. (2024). Dementia prevention, intervention, and care: 2024 report of the Lancet standing Commission. The Lancet Commissions.
• Langer, E. The Mindful Body.