Organizational culture: definition, 4 types and 20 examples
Organizational culture is the shared values, habits and unwritten rules that shape how work gets done. Take the 6-question check to see which of the four types your team leans toward.
Question 1 of 6
Someone makes a visible mistake. What usually happens next?
A quick self-check written for this page and based on the Competing Values Framework, not the OCAI.
Every workplace has an organizational culture, whether anyone designed it or not. It is the answer to questions nobody writes down: what really gets you promoted, what happens when you disagree with your boss, whether Friday at 6 pm is a deadline or a joke. This guide gives you a plain definition, the four culture types researchers use, 20 company culture examples you can learn from, Edgar Schein’s three levels of culture, and a realistic six-month plan to change yours.
Organizational culture definition
Organizational culture is the set of shared values, beliefs, behaviors and unwritten rules that shape how people in an organization work together. To explain organisational culture in one line: it is “how we do things around here”, especially when nobody is checking.
It shows up in a few places you can actually observe:
- What gets rewarded. Who gets promoted, praised and given the interesting projects.
- How decisions get made. By the boss, by consensus, by data or by whoever shouts loudest.
- How mistakes are handled. Learned from in the open, or hidden until they blow up.
- How people treat each other. Especially under pressure, across levels and toward newcomers.
Culture matters because it decides what people do when the rules don’t cover a situation, which is most of the time. When it goes wrong, it goes very wrong; our guide to a toxic work environment covers the warning signs.
The 4 types of organizational culture
The best-known model is the Competing Values Framework, developed by Robert Quinn and John Rohrbaugh and applied to culture by Kim Cameron and Robert Quinn. It places organizations on two axes: flexibility and discretion versus stability and control, and an internal focus on people and process versus an external focus on customers and competitors. Each corner is one culture type.
1. Clan culture
Flexibility and discretion, internal focus
Values: Loyalty, teamwork, development and looking after people. Leaders act like mentors.
Strengths: High trust, low turnover and people who help each other without being asked.
Risks: Hard conversations get avoided, decisions take long, and results can slide while everyone stays friendly.
Example: A 60-person family-owned manufacturer where the founder knows every name and people stay for decades.
2. Adhocracy culture
Flexibility and discretion, external focus
Values: New ideas, experiments, speed and individual initiative. Leaders act like entrepreneurs.
Strengths: Fast learning, products nobody else has, and an energy that attracts builders.
Risks: Too many half-finished projects, unclear ownership, and burnout for people who need stability.
Example: A product studio where small teams form around an idea, ship a test in two weeks and disband.
3. Market culture
Stability and control, external focus
Values: Winning, targets, customers and competitive position. Leaders act like hard-driving competitors.
Strengths: Clear goals, fast decisions, and results everyone can see on the scoreboard.
Risks: Internal competition, short-term thinking and a pace that wears good people down.
Example: A sales organization with a weekly leaderboard, quarterly quotas and a big win celebrated loudly.
4. Hierarchy culture
Stability and control, internal focus
Values: Process, stability, efficiency and doing things right. Leaders act like coordinators.
Strengths: Reliability, safety, low error rates and a clear answer to who decides what.
Risks: Slow change, layers of approval and people who stop suggesting improvements.
Example: A hospital pharmacy where every step is checked twice and nobody improvises with a dose.
No type is the right one. Most organizations mix all four, and healthy ones lean on different types in different teams: you want hierarchy in payroll and adhocracy in the new product team. For words that fit each type, see our words to describe company culture.
Edgar Schein's three levels of culture
Schein, an MIT professor, described culture in layers in his book Organizational Culture and Leadership (first published in 1985). In plain words, with one fictional company walked through all three:
1. Artifacts
What you can see and hear: the office layout, the dress code, how meetings run, the words on the wall, the tools people use.
At our example company: Open desks, a values poster that says "customers first", and a support queue screen in the kitchen.
2. Espoused values
What the organization says it believes: the stated values, the strategy, the rules people quote when asked.
At our example company: Leaders say customer happiness matters more than speed, and it is in every onboarding deck.
3. Basic assumptions
What people take for granted without saying it. This is the real culture, and it wins when it disagrees with the poster.
At our example company: Everyone knows the person who closes the most tickets gets promoted, so speed quietly beats care.
20 company culture examples, and what to borrow
The first 15 are practices the companies have documented publicly, in their own books, letters and handbooks. The last 5 are composite examples of ordinary workplaces, invented for illustration. The type in parentheses is our reading, not a label the company uses. Each ends with a small version any team can try.
- Toyota: anyone can stop the line (hierarchy)
On Toyota production lines, any worker can pull the andon cord to flag a problem, and the line can stop until it is fixed.
Borrow it: Give every person a visible, blame-free way to say "stop, something is wrong".
- Amazon: memos instead of slides (market)
In his 2017 shareholder letter, Jeff Bezos described how Amazon meetings start with a six-page narrative memo that everyone reads in silence before discussing.
Borrow it: For your next big decision, write one page and read it together for five minutes before you talk.
- Pixar: the Braintrust (adhocracy)
Ed Catmull's book Creativity, Inc. (2014) describes the Braintrust, a group of filmmakers who give candid notes on films in progress, while the director decides what to use.
Borrow it: Run a candid feedback session where the owner keeps the final call.
- Netflix: a published culture document (market)
Netflix has published its culture in writing since its 2009 culture deck, built around freedom and responsibility and leading with context rather than control.
Borrow it: Write down how decisions really get made on your team, and share it with every new hire.
- Patagonia: let my people go surfing (clan)
Founder Yvon Chouinard titled his 2005 book Let My People Go Surfing after the company's flexible approach to when people work.
Borrow it: Agree on outcomes and deadlines, then let people choose when the work happens.
- GitLab: the public handbook (hierarchy)
GitLab, an all-remote company, publishes its company handbook online, covering how it works, communicates and decides.
Borrow it: Keep one written page per process, so nobody has to ask the same question twice.
- Buffer: open salaries (clan)
In 2013 Buffer began publishing its salary formula and the salaries of its team.
Borrow it: Even without publishing pay, explain how pay decisions are made.
- Atlassian: ShipIt (adhocracy)
Atlassian runs ShipIt, regular hackathons where employees spend about a day building anything they want and then demo it.
Borrow it: Give the team one day a quarter to build something off the roadmap, then show it.
- Microsoft: a growth mindset (adhocracy)
Satya Nadella's 2017 book Hit Refresh describes his push, after becoming CEO in 2014, to move Microsoft's culture toward a growth mindset: learning over knowing it all.
Borrow it: In reviews, ask "what did you learn?" before "what did you deliver?"
- W. L. Gore: the lattice (clan)
Gore is known for its lattice organization, where associates work directly with each other and leaders emerge by who people choose to follow.
Borrow it: Let people go straight to whoever can help, without routing through managers.
- Spotify: squads and tribes (adhocracy)
In 2012 Spotify described organizing engineers into small autonomous squads grouped into tribes, with chapters and guilds connecting people across them.
Borrow it: Give a small team one clear mission and the freedom to decide how to reach it.
- Valve: desks on wheels (adhocracy)
Valve's 2012 handbook for new employees described a flat company where desks have wheels so people can move to the project they choose.
Borrow it: Let people volunteer for projects instead of only assigning them.
- 37signals: six-week cycles (hierarchy)
The book Shape Up (2019) describes how the company behind Basecamp works in six-week cycles with a cool-down period between them.
Borrow it: Plan work in fixed cycles with a short break between them for cleanup and thinking.
- Mayo Clinic: the patient comes first (clan)
Mayo Clinic names "the needs of the patient come first" as its primary value.
Borrow it: Name the one value that breaks ties on your team, and use it out loud when you decide.
- Google: OKRs (market)
John Doerr's book Measure What Matters (2018) tells how he introduced objectives and key results to Google in 1999.
Borrow it: Set one objective a quarter with three measurable key results the whole team can see.
- A regional credit union (composite example, hierarchy)
Every procedure is written down, audits are routine and members get the same answer from any branch.
Borrow it: Consistency is a culture too: document the five tasks people get wrong most.
- A 40-person marketing agency (composite example, adhocracy)
Teams pitch wild ideas on Monday, the best one gets a rough version by Thursday and clients see it Friday.
Borrow it: Shorten the time from idea to something people can react to.
- A software sales team (composite example, market)
Deals are rung on a bell, the quarter's leaderboard is on a screen, and top sellers mentor the newest reps.
Borrow it: Pair competition with one team goal, so winners help others win.
- A small nonprofit (composite example, clan)
Twelve staff, a shared lunch every Wednesday, and decisions made around one table after everyone speaks.
Borrow it: A shared meal on a fixed day builds more trust than any offsite.
- A hospital nursing unit (composite example, hierarchy)
Shift handovers follow the same checklist every time, and a nurse who spots a risk is thanked, not questioned.
Borrow it: A strict process and a safe place to speak up can live together.
Notice that the strongest work culture examples are small, repeated practices rather than perks. If you want a group to run those practices day to day, our culture committee ideas include a charter and a meeting agenda.
How to assess your organizational culture
Start with what people do, then compare it with what the organization says.
- Collect stories. Ask ten people for a story about someone who got ahead here, and one about someone who got in trouble. The stories reveal the real rules.
- Walk the artifacts. Look at your meeting calendar, who gets invited, what the office or chat channels reward, and what gets celebrated at all-hands.
- Compare stated values with recent decisions. Take your values list and find the last hard decision for each. Did the value win?
- Run a short pulse survey. Five to ten questions, anonymous, every quarter. Track the trend, not one score.
- Listen to people on their way in and out. Ask new hires after 90 days what surprised them, and ask leavers what would have kept them.
- Take the quiz above as a team. Have five people take it separately, then compare. Disagreement is itself a finding.
For the survey step, KraftyLab Intelligence has 20 ready-made survey templates, from eNPS to burnout. People answer in the browser with no account, you get AI summaries of the answers, and you can send any survey to anyone by email, with or without an event.
How to change organizational culture: a 6-month plan
Culture changes slowly, and only when behavior and systems change together. A realistic plan for a team or department:
- Month 1Diagnose. Collect stories, run a pulse survey and name the gap in one sentence: "We say X, but we reward Y."
- Month 2Pick two behaviors. Choose two concrete behaviors to change, not values. "Decisions get written down within a day" beats "we value transparency".
- Month 3Leaders go first. Senior people model the new behaviors visibly, and say out loud when they slip.
- Month 4Change the systems. Update one thing that rewards the old way: a review question, a promotion criterion, a meeting format.
- Month 5Tell the stories. Share examples of people doing it right, by name, at all-hands and in team channels.
- Month 6Measure and adjust. Repeat the pulse survey, compare with month 1, keep what moved and drop what didn't.
The behaviors that matter most are usually the ones that make teams effective: problems raised early, clear owners, decisions that stick. Our guide to high performing teams covers them in detail, and our employee engagement ideas help keep the change going.
Organizational culture in remote teams
- Write it down. In a remote team, culture lives in documents and channels. If a norm isn't written, new people never learn it.
- Make the invisible visible. Share wins, thanks and decisions in public channels, because nobody overhears them in a hallway.
- Default to asynchronous, meet on purpose. Save live calls for connection, conflict and big decisions.
- Protect time zones. Rotate meeting times so the same people aren't always on at night.
- Plan shared experiences. A hosted game or workshop on a call gives remote people something in common to talk about afterward.
Shared experiences that carry culture
Culture spreads through shared moments. Our hosted events run live on Zoom by default (Teams, Google Meet or Webex on request), and you can see every format for remote team building or get a free quote. Book about 2 weeks ahead.
Four ways in: a workshop on openness, a team discovery game, a quiz show and a creative games hour.
