The culture was boldly announced at the entrance. The values were painted on the wall in six-foot letters.
Integrity. Service. Teamwork. Excellence.
When Dzifa became the new head of a regional company, he noticed them on his first morning. He had read the same words in the employee handbook and heard them during interviews with the board.
By the end of his first month, however, Dzifa had learned another set of values.
Do not bring senior leaders bad news unless you already have a solution. Never challenge a director in a large meeting. Respond to the CEO quickly, even if another customer problem is more urgent. And when something goes wrong, make sure your department is not blamed.
None of those rules appeared on the wall.
But employees knew them.
That is what the cultural approach to organizations helps us understand. Communication scholars Michael Pacanowsky and Nick O'Donnell-Trujillo, drawing heavily on anthropologist Clifford Geertz, argued that organizational life can be understood by examining the meanings people create and perform together. Their 1982 article, Communication and Organizational Cultures, became an important foundation for this approach.
In plain language, workplace culture is not only what an organization says it believes.
It is what people learn by watching what happens.
The wall said teamwork. The meeting taught something else.
A few weeks into the job, Dzifa attended a leadership meeting where a customer problem was discussed.
A manager named Richard explained that his team had missed a deadline because another department delivered information late.
The director of that department immediately defended his people.
“That is not what happened.”
Within minutes, the meeting became an argument about whose department was responsible.
Nobody asked what the customer needed next.
Dzifa noticed something important. The company claimed to value teamwork, but its meetings taught leaders to protect territory first.
That meeting was a cultural performance.
Pacanowsky and O'Donnell-Trujillo encouraged researchers to look at organizational rituals, stories, metaphors, and other communication performances because these reveal how members make sense of organizational life.
The meeting was not simply where the company's culture appeared.
The meeting was one of the places where culture was being created.
This is why structure is built by what people keep doing. When people repeat the same behavior long enough, it starts to feel less like a choice and more like “how things work around here.”
Stories reveal what the organization really admires
Dzifa started listening to the stories employees told.
One story came up repeatedly.
Years earlier, a manager had challenged a senior executive during a meeting. The manager had been correct, but people remembered that his career stalled afterward.
Employees usually told the story with a laugh.
“Marcus learned the hard way,” someone said.
That story taught more about the company than the value statement about integrity.
It told employees that truth had limits when authority was involved.
Organizations are filled with stories like this. There are stories about founders, difficult customers, heroic employees, terrible managers, promotions, mistakes, layoffs, and moments when someone broke an unwritten rule.
As we saw in stories turn individuals into a group, repeated stories help groups identify heroes, villains, values, and expectations.
If you want to understand a workplace culture, ask employees:
“What story does everyone here know?”
Then listen carefully to the lesson hidden inside it.
Rituals tell people what matters
Dzifa also noticed the rituals.
Every Monday began with a two-hour leadership meeting. Everyone complained about it, but nobody suggested changing it.
When a major sales contract closed, sales employees were celebrated publicly. When operations prevented a serious customer problem, almost nobody heard about it.
Senior executives parked near the entrance. Everyone else parked farther away.
None of these things was necessarily wrong by itself.
But together they communicated.
Rituals tell people what deserves attention. Recognition tells people what counts as success. Seating arrangements, meeting habits, titles, celebrations, and even who receives information first can signal status and belonging.
That is why organizational culture cannot be understood only by reading policies.
You have to watch the performances.
New employees become cultural detectives
Dzifa asked several recent hires what surprised them most after joining the company.
One said, “People are much more careful in meetings than I expected.”
Another said, “You have to learn which questions can be asked publicly and which ones should be asked privately.”
A third said, “The company says decisions are decentralized, but everyone still waits for senior leadership.”
New employees often notice culture more clearly because they have not yet become accustomed to it.
As explored in the employee identification process, newcomers watch the visible and invisible rules of an organization before they begin to understand what belonging actually requires.
Eventually, what once looked unusual becomes normal.
That is one reason leaders should ask new employees what they noticed before familiarity makes the strange seem ordinary.
Every workplace develops a language
Dzifa also began noticing phrases that carried special meaning inside the company.
“Take it offline” usually meant, “Stop discussing this in front of everyone.”
“Leadership is aware” meant, “Do not expect an immediate answer.”
“Be strategic” sometimes meant, “Do not challenge this directly.”
Other organizations have different phrases.
Families do too.
Every group develops shorthand that insiders understand and outsiders have to learn. This is why every community has codes for how to speak. Groups develop local rules for disagreement, humor, respect, silence, and who may say what to whom.
Language helps carry culture because words do more than describe reality.
Repeated phrases teach people how the group interprets reality.
Leaders shape culture most when they are not talking about culture
Dzifa initially considered launching a culture initiative.
He imagined workshops, new values statements, and a company-wide presentation.
Then he realized the organization did not need more words about teamwork.
It needed different experiences.
So he changed how he ran meetings.
When someone raised a problem, Dzifa stopped asking, “Whose fault is this?” and began asking, “What does the customer need, and what do we need to learn?”
When a manager disagreed with him, he resisted defending himself immediately.
When operations prevented a problem, the team received recognition.
When bad news arrived early, he thanked the person who brought it instead of punishing the messenger.
Slowly, employees began learning different rules.
Not because Dzifa announced a new culture, but because people were watching what happened.
This also explains why reputation becomes part of the message. People judge leaders not only through speeches but through patterns of tone, timing, decisions, follow-through, and behavior.
Every response teaches the organization something.
How to use this theory in real life
If you want to understand your organizational culture, do not begin with the values statement.
Begin with observation.
Listen to the stories people repeat. Watch what happens after someone makes a mistake. Notice who can disagree openly. Pay attention to which employees receive recognition and which contributions remain invisible.
Study the rituals. Which meetings seem sacred? What behaviors are celebrated? What do people joke about? What language does everyone understand without explanation?
Then compare the stated values with the lived values.
If an organization says it values honesty, what happens when someone delivers uncomfortable truth?
If it says it values innovation, what happens when an experiment fails?
If it says it values people, what happens when financial pressure arrives?
Those moments reveal more about culture than posters ever will.
Watch out for this
The cultural approach can tempt us to interpret every workplace habit as deeply symbolic.
Sometimes a meeting exists because nobody has bothered to cancel it. Sometimes a seating arrangement is simply convenient.
Culture also is not completely uniform. Different departments, teams, professions, and generations may develop their own subcultures inside the same organization.
The goal is not to find hidden meaning in everything.
The goal is to notice repeated patterns of meaning that help people understand what kind of place they belong to and what behavior that place rewards.
One thing to remember
Dzifa did not change the company by replacing the words painted on the wall.
He changed what people experienced beneath those words.
That is the insight of the cultural approach to organizations.
Culture is found in stories, rituals, language, symbols, meetings, reactions, and repeated behavior.
If you want to know what an organization truly values, do not ask only what it says.
Watch what happens.
Reflection question
If a new employee ignored your organization's value statements and learned only by watching what gets rewarded, punished, celebrated, and tolerated, what would they conclude your culture really values?
