On the Use and Abuse of Culture Assessments in Organizational Life

Since the late 1970s, the topic of “organizational culture” captured the imagination of both leaders and scholars. Numerous conferences, thousands of articles, and multiple best sellers argue for using culture as a vehicle to understand how organizations function and the extent to which they succeed or fail. Indeed, a 2017 survey showed that 78% of Fortune 1000 CEO’s and CFO’s consider culture as one of the top three factors impacting their firm’s value.

Unsurprisingly, this interest has spawned an industry devoted to measuring and helping organizations improve their cultures as a whole or aspects of culture (for example, safety cultures, cultures of innovation, cultures of engagement, etc.). Deloitte recently estimated that American companies spend over $1 billion annually on employee engagement and a Harvard Business Review analysis found that organizations averaged $2,200 per employee per year on improving culture.

However, in spite of the resources devoted to the study of…