Culture is a Workplace Buzzword

Part 1: The Messy Monday Culture Problem Series

I hope you found your way to this blog after reading the last entry in my Messy Monday Fraud Series. A takeaway from that last article was that an undefined workplace culture often allows for weaponization of the idea of "culture" to meet what leadership wants it to in that moment.

This series starts with a question I think most of us have been handed without ever really unpacking it: what are we actually talking about when we talk about workplace culture? And does the way we've been talking about it explain why so little seems to change year over year.

I spent years inside one of the largest organizations in the country. Values statements and mission statements that sat at the heart at what so many of us did. Terms like psychological safety, high reliability and just culture were mentioned at every leadership meeting. But I sat in the rooms where people used those terms yet, when it came down to it, there was almost no shared agreement on what it meant in practice or any evidence that it was having impact.

So let's try to actually define it.

That's a Pretty Poster

Here is what culture is not:

• It is not the values statement on your organization's website.

• It is not the slide in the all-hands deck.

• It is not what the CEO says in a town hall.

• It is not the marketing poster touting the new approach to workplace morale.

• It is not the buzzwords on the careers page. "People-first." "Collaborative." "Innovative." "Dynamic."

Researchers at MIT Sloan found, after analyzing more than 1.2 million employee reviews across 500 large organizations, a gap between official values and the cultural reality on the ground in most organizations. Not some organizations. Most. And when they looked more closely, they found no correlation, on average, between a company's official culture and how well core values are practiced on a day-to-day basis. Employees generally, and rightly, were cynical about their employer's core value statements and did not expect leaders to live those values. [MIT Sloan Management Review]

That means those beautifully simple mission and values and the daily reality are operating in parallel universes, and most employees already know it. They have just stopped saying so out loud.

Integrity was the most common value listed by companies, cited by 65% of all organizations, followed by collaboration and customer focus. [MIT Sloan Management Review]

Integrity has at least three distinct definitions in common use:

• Moral integrity: Doing the right thing, particularly when no one is watching. Consistency between your stated values and your actual behavior.

• Professional integrity: Honesty and transparency in your work product. Not cutting corners. Not taking credit that is not yours. Delivering what you said you would deliver.

• Structural integrity: Used in engineering to describe a system that holds together under pressure without failing or fracturing. A building has structural integrity when its components work together the way they were designed to.

Sounds great right? I want to work for a place that prioritizes all of those. But the reality of meeting all three of those pillars, looks pretty grim.

Integrity is just one word, even if the one that seems to carry the most weight at the end of the day. But the point is not that organizations fail at integrity specifically. The point is that the gap between what gets written down and what actually happens is systematic, and it shows up across every value, in every industry, at every level. Integrity. Respect. Collaboration. Innovation. The word changes. The gap does not.

Upcoming segments to this series will dive into actual case studies that highlight these gaps and push into the spotlight what companies and organizations often hope stays in the shadows or is kept quiet through settlements.

Culture is the explanation for why the these gaps exist and why they persist. It is not the values list. It is not the training.

Culture is the set of behaviors a group actually rewards, tolerates, and punishes. Not the behaviors it claims to reward.

The ones it demonstrates, consistently, in ordinary moments:

• Who gets promoted.

• Who gets heard in a meeting.

• What happens when someone raises a problem.

• What happens when someone does not.

• How people talk about the organization when they are not on the clock.

Not just when not on the clock, but when they think no one is really listening. What do the people who work there say about the place at dinner? What do they say to a friend who asks if they should apply? That conversation, the one that happens without an audience, is the real culture survey. And most organizations have never seen the results.

The Framework That Changed How Researchers Think About This

In the late 1960s, a Dutch social psychologist named Geert Hofstede [Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory] began studying IBM employees across dozens of countries, eventually surveying more than 117,000 people, trying to understand why workers in different national cultures behaved so differently inside the same company. His analysis identified systematic differences in national cultures on four primary dimensions: power distance, individualism, uncertainty avoidance, and masculinity, with power distance defined as the extent to which less powerful members of organizations accept and expect that power is distributed unequally.

This framework is not a personality test and it is not a tool for stereotyping anyone. Hofstede himself was clear on that. These are population-level tendencies, not individual verdicts. But they give us something useful: a shared vocabulary for talking about what cultures value, as opposed to what they say they value.

The United States scored 91 on individualism, making it one of the most individualistic countries in the world, and within American organizations, hierarchy tends to be established for convenience rather than deference, with managers relying on individual employees and teams for expertise.

Low power distance combined with extreme individualism produces something specific: an organization where the hierarchy exists on paper, accountability lands on individuals, and the structures that distribute or redistribute power are informal and therefore largely invisible.

Informal and invisible also means unspoken.

And what goes unspoken in most American workplaces is that the hierarchy is very much alive. It just expresses itself through compensation instead of title. Everyone knows who makes what, roughly, even when the numbers are never said out loud.

Did you know that every Not-For-Profit institution has to report their top paid employees on their annual 990 Tax Filing? If you've never looked up your local hospital or Not-For-Profit in name, you've got an assignment. You might be floored to see what the top earners are taking home.

Pro-Publica and Guidestar have great searches for this. You can search by organization or even name of individual. We won't even get into the For Profit companies. Their information is available in shareholder releases and annual updates, though often a little trickier to navigate because of the calculation of stock options and other valuations. Take a look at those filings through SEC's EDGAR site.

This became a hot topic just this week when a cardiologist at UPMC filed a federal lawsuit alleging he was terminated after raising concerns through the compliance hotline about a potential conflict of interest — the health system's CEO holds a paid seat on the board of a medical device company that does business with UPMC. According to SEC filings cited in the complaint, that board seat generated more than $300,000 in compensation for the CEO in a single year. Far more money than the majority of hospital staff make. All to sit on one Board. The lawsuit is pending. No findings have been made.

Everyone knows that the gap between the person answering the phone and the person in the corner office is not just organizational. It is economic. It creates a class system inside the building, one that nobody names but everyone navigates. The values statement says we are all on the same team. The paycheck says something different.

You cannot fix what you cannot see. And we have built a culture that is very good at not seeing this and when we do, we explain it away with weak, but long accepted excuses.

What Culture Actually Predicts

A comprehensive study of 34 million employee profiles found that toxic workplace culture was the single strongest predictor of the workforce departures we came to call the Great Resignation, outranking compensation, hours, and other commonly cited factors.

It's important to note we just talked about compensation gaps, so while compensation is not cited, that widening and often ignored gap in compensation contributes to culture of division and hierarchy and that matters.

A separate study found that culture is the single best predictor of employee satisfaction, ahead of compensation and work-life balance, with nearly two-thirds of employees listing corporate culture among the most important reasons they stay with their current employer or start looking for another job. [MIT Sloan Management Review]

Much of my career was focused on the mechanics of compliance and risk — building the structures, documenting the controls, trying to create accountability where it did not exist. That work matters. But all of it operates inside something larger. The formal structure and the informal culture are in constant conversation, and when they diverge enough, the culture wins. Every time. No matter how strongly built, culture can easily be fractured when enough power is given to one individual.

The structure that says 'report concerns through the hotline' can coexist with a culture that makes it professionally dangerous to use it. The policy that says 'we do not retaliate' can coexist with a culture where people who raise problems quietly disappear from the table. The values statement that says 'we treat people with dignity' can coexist with a culture where a specific manager has been treating people without it for years and everyone knows it and no one has done anything about it.

Those are not hypotheticals.

Why Fixing Culture Often Fails

MIT Sloan research found that women are 41% more likely than men to experience toxic workplace culture, a gap that worsens with seniority, with women in C-level roles 53% more likely to report toxicity. That finding sits inside the same dataset that found companies listing "respect" as a core value. When culture breaks down to a point where intervention is warranted, we often still miss the mark of how and what to fix.

We see the same approaches, the same attempts to reset:

• A training

• A consultant

• A new initiative

• A values refresh

Sometimes those things help. More often, they treat the surface level problem rather than the operating one. We will spend more time on exactly that in a later part of this series.

Researchers found that employees generally do not expect leaders to live core values, but they pay close attention when leaders do, giving significant positive weight in their assessments to leaders who practice what they preach.

When I first read that finding I thought, 'how sad that we don't expect the leaders to actually walk the walk'. Employees have already calibrated their expectations down. They are watching for evidence that anything is different. And they are mostly not finding it.

That is the starting point for everything that follows in this series. Not despair. Clarity. You cannot build toward something better if you will not look clearly at what you are standing in.

Next week, we look at who has actually been in the room making decisions — and what the data on boards, leadership teams, and the long arc of that question tells us about how we got here and who is and more importantly, is not, part of the culture change conversation.

Primary Sources:

MIT Sloan Management Review / CultureX (Sull, Turconi & Sull, 2020; 2021)

Hofstede's Cultural Dimensions Theory (Hofstede, 1980; Hofstede, Hofstede & Minkov, 2010)

MIT Sloan Management Review, 10 Things Your Corporate Culture Needs to Get Right (Sull & Sull, 2021)

Glassdoor Culture 500 (1.2 million employee reviews)

MIT Sloan / Revelio Labs, Toxic Culture Is Driving the Great Resignation (Sull, Sull & Zweig, 2022)

Gada v. UPMC and Pinnacle Health Cardiovascular Institute, Inc., Civil Action No. 2:26-cv-00524-JFC (W.D. Pa. filed Mar. 31, 2026)