Blog: Does changing culture change behaviour?

By Prof. Rob Briner, Director (Research)

Culture change has also become a widespread custom and practice within organisations.  As with many other common practices its value is rarely challenged.

But what is culture? ‘Culture’ is something we may feel particularly when we join a new organisation.  We get a sense of the typical and shared ways people and groups within the organisation seem to behave which can appear different to those typical or shared ways of behaving we’ve believe we have seen in other organisations.

But what is it we are really experiencing? It’s important first to note that we are pattern seekers. As humans we have a cognitive bias towards looking for and finding patterns, structure and consistency in information and data which may in fact not be there. There may of course be some real differences in the behaviours we are observing in a new organisation but this doesn’t mean such behaviours are typical or generally found right across the organisation.

An everyday example of this is when people perceive that different cities or different areas of a country have different cultures and are therefore very different from each other in terms of their typical and general behaviours.  In the UK for example, people who live in the North are regarded by some as much more friendly than people in the South. Some of you reading this – particularly if you are from the North – no doubt agree.  But on what are such perceptions based?  Of course, we can only have very small samples of behaviour from a relatively tiny number of people on which to base this perception given that millions of people live in each of these areas. What we tend to do is take this very limited data and see it as a consistent pattern and attribute it to, in this case, geographical location.

The first limitation to this approach to behaviour change is that there may not, in fact, be a monolithic ‘culture’ to change in the first place. There may be many different behaviours right across the organisation which are actually quite inconsistent. Or, there may be ‘sub-cultures’ where we can identify some consistent patterns of behaviour but these exist in small groups or parts of the organisation. And, even within these groups, there may be ‘sub-sub-cultures’, and so forth. In this sense, culture is not ‘a thing’.

A second and more important limitation, relates to typical definitions of culture. It is often described as ‘the way people do things around here’. In other words, as discussed above, it’s about typical and shared ways of behaving. If we use this definition, then the argument for using culture change to change behaviour is as follows: In order to change the way people do things around here (behaviour) we need to change the way people do things around here (culture).  In other words, it is a circular argument that doesn’t really make sense.  Culture is not a cause of behaviour, it is a description of behaviour.

Even if we consider culture to be behavioural norms – which do seem to influence behaviour – it still remains the case that we need to change behaviour to change such norms.

When organisations or their leaders say they want to change the culture what they really mean is they want to change employee behaviour: typically to remove or reduce undesirable behaviours and to increase or introduce desirable behaviours. Of course, it certainly does make sense, as discussed throughout this report, to focus on specific, observable and measurable behaviours. However, trying to change behaviour through the mechanism of changing culture is ineffective.

This is an extract from CRF’s research report on Behaviour Change in Organisations. Access the full report here.

You can also view the audio resources regarding the Behaviour Change in Organisations research below: