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What Is Culture?
Culture refers to an accepted way of doing things within a social group. These social groups can take many forms, from nations to social classes and from entire organizations to professions and specific work teams.
Why Is Understanding Culture Vital for HR Professionals?
HR is responsible for an array of processes that are all focused on one goal: getting people to act in ways that enhance the company’s profitability. Culture is one of the key drivers of human behaviour and is therefore a vital concern to anyone interested in shaping it. In fact, research such as the Stanford Prison Experiment show that different people placed in the same situational culture tend to conform to cultural expectations even when those expectations defy rational logic and personal values.
Where Does Culture Come From?
Culture emerges over time as groups of people:
- Come up with ways to meet challenges faced by group members, and then
- Repeatedly apply these same solutions whenever they are faced with similar situations
Over time, people just start to accept that “that is just the way things are around here”, and that “that is how things get done around here”.
Where Culture Comes From
As new people are introduced to the group, they quickly learn these unwritten rules both through watching others and through experiencing the consequences (good and bad) of their own actions.
Can—and Should—Culture Be Changed?
Culture is, on its own, neither good nor bad. All over the world, cultural norms tend to flourish particularly well when they adequately meet the challenges people face. However, even when cultural norms do not help people survive and thrive in their environment, they can persist. In these cases, they can and should be changed, and this is part of the role of the HR department. While some authors assert this task is impossible, the historical reality is that cultures have either changed with the times or ceased to exist. If your company’s success hinges on getting people to embrace ideas and actions that differ from existing cultural norms, deciding that it is an unreachable goal is a sure-fire way to plunge into irrelevance and eventual oblivion.
