Every organization has a culture, whether it was built on purpose or not. The question is whether leaders are shaping it, or just reacting to it. Organizational culture and leadership are so deeply intertwined that Edgar Schein, the researcher who literally wrote the book on the subject, argued they are two sides of the same coin. Leaders create culture through their actions, decisions, and priorities. Culture, in turn, shapes who rises to lead next.
This is something I’ve seen play out everywhere, from fire stations to adventure racing teams to Fortune 500 boardrooms. At Robyn Benincasa, our work helping organizations build high-performing, cohesive teams starts with one truth: you cannot separate how a group performs from the culture its leaders set in motion. The teams that win aren’t the ones with the most talent. They’re the ones where leadership actively builds a culture of shared commitment, trust, and mutual accountability.
So what exactly is the mechanism behind this relationship? How do leaders embed their values into the DNA of an organization, and how does culture push back on leadership over time? This article breaks down Schein’s foundational framework, explores the specific ways leaders shape culture at every stage of an organization’s life, and gives you practical insight into making this dynamic work for, not against, your team.
Why culture and leadership shape each other
The relationship between organizational culture and leadership is not a one-way street. Leaders do not simply hand down values from the top and watch them take hold. Culture pushes back. It filters decisions, rewards certain behaviors, and quietly resists change when a leader’s actions contradict the norms already embedded in the group. Understanding this two-way dynamic is the starting point for any leader who wants to build a team that actually performs under pressure.
How leaders set culture in motion
Every culture starts somewhere, and in most organizations, it starts with the founder or the first leader to hold real authority. The choices they make about what to pay attention to, who they reward, what problems they overlook, and how they respond in a crisis all send clear signals to the people around them. Teams are pattern-recognition machines. They watch what leadership does, not what leadership says, and they adjust their behavior accordingly.
This is why consistency between words and actions carries so much weight. A leader who publicly champions collaboration but privately competes with peers for credit teaches a very specific lesson. The team learns to do the same. Over time, those behaviors become norms. Norms become expectations. Expectations harden into culture. This entire process does not require a policy document or a values poster on the wall. It happens whether you manage it or not.
The culture your team operates in right now is a direct reflection of the behaviors your leadership has consistently modeled, tolerated, or rewarded.
How culture shapes leadership over time
Once a culture is established, it does not sit passively. It actively shapes who gets promoted, whose ideas gain traction, and which leadership styles feel natural within the organization. A culture built around individual achievement will tend to elevate competitive, self-reliant leaders. A culture built around shared accountability will tend to surface leaders who are strong collaborators and communicators.
That feedback loop has a practical consequence for you as a leader: the culture you inherit is a real constraint on your speed. If you step into a leadership role inside a culture that values hierarchy and deference, pushing for radical transparency will create friction before it creates momentum. That does not mean change is impossible. It means change requires you to understand the existing culture before you try to move it.
Edgar Schein’s foundational research makes this point clearly. Schein argued that when leaders fail to recognize the cultural assumptions already operating in their organization, they end up fighting an invisible force. The culture is not broken. It is simply running on a different operating system than the one the leader has in mind.
Leadership transitions illustrate this reality well. When a new leader arrives with a different set of values and behaviors, the culture does not automatically update to match. The existing norms persist until the leader is deliberate and consistent enough, over a long enough period, to shift them. Most leaders underestimate how long that takes and how much sustained, intentional effort the process demands.
What organizational culture includes and how it forms
Organizational culture is not just the values statement on a company website or the ping pong table in the break room. It is the sum of shared beliefs, behaviors, and unspoken rules that determine how work actually gets done inside a group. Before you can connect organizational culture and leadership in a meaningful way, you need a clear picture of what culture actually contains and how it comes together.
The core components of culture
Culture operates on multiple levels at once. At the surface, you see visible artifacts: the way people dress, the language they use in meetings, the layout of the office, and the rituals around milestones like promotions or project launches. Beneath that surface sit shared values and beliefs, the things a group agrees are important, right, or worth protecting. These are partially visible, and people will describe them to you if you ask.
The deepest layer is the hardest to work with: basic underlying assumptions. These are the beliefs so ingrained that the people who hold them rarely notice. They are treated as obvious facts rather than choices. A team might assume, without ever discussing it, that bad news should be kept from senior leaders, or that seniority equals authority. Those assumptions drive behavior just as powerfully as any written policy.
The layer of culture you can see is rarely the layer that controls behavior.
How culture forms over time
Culture forms through repeated experience. When a team faces a problem and a particular approach works, the group remembers it. When that approach works again, it starts to feel like the right way. Over enough repetitions, it becomes the only way anyone considers. This is how successful behaviors get locked in as norms, even when the original conditions that made them successful no longer exist.
The founding period of any group carries outsized influence on the culture that follows. Early decisions about who gets recognized, what problems get taken seriously, and how conflict is handled all leave a lasting imprint. Even after the original team has turned over completely, those early patterns often persist in the structure, processes, and unspoken expectations that new members inherit on day one.
How leaders create, reinforce, and change culture
Leadership does not create culture through mission statements or off-site retreats. It creates culture through repeated behavior and the patterns of attention that leaders demonstrate every day. The connection between organizational culture and leadership runs through every decision a leader makes, whether they are conscious of it or not. Your team is always watching, always drawing conclusions about what actually matters here.
Creating culture through founding behaviors
The most powerful cultural input any leader will ever have is what they do in the earliest days of a team or organization. When a problem surfaces, how you respond tells everyone watching what the group genuinely values. If you react to a missed deadline by focusing on process improvement, you signal that learning comes before blame. If you react by finding fault, you signal that self-protection is the smart play. Those early signals compound fast, and they are far harder to correct later than they are to set right from the start.
Your team is constantly running experiments to figure out what behavior the environment rewards. Every decision you make in the first year is data they collect and store as a reference point for the years that follow. Those early patterns become the invisible rulebook for everyone who joins after you.
Reinforcing culture through consistent signals
Once culture starts forming, what you tolerate matters as much as what you promote. If a senior performer regularly undercuts colleagues and faces no consequence, the team updates its understanding of the real values in play. Reinforcement is not a single conversation or a recognition program. It is the accumulated weight of small, consistent signals delivered over time.
The culture you claim to have and the culture your team actually lives in are only identical if your behavior makes them so.
Changing a culture that is already set
Shifting an established culture requires more patience than most leaders budget for. You are not just changing behavior; you are replacing deeply held assumptions about how things work and what is safe. The most effective approach is to model the target behavior yourself, visibly and consistently, well before you expect the team to follow.
Start by identifying the two or three norms that most directly block the culture you want to build. Focus your attention there first rather than trying to move everything at once. Culture change that sticks is specific, sustained, and led from the front.
Schein’s model: three levels of organizational culture
Edgar Schein’s model remains the most widely cited framework for understanding how organizational culture and leadership interact. Published in his book Organizational Culture and Leadership, Schein proposed that culture exists on three distinct levels, each harder to observe and harder to change than the one above it. Understanding all three gives you a map for where to look when a team’s behavior does not match its stated values.
Level one: artifacts
Artifacts are the most visible layer of culture. They include everything you can see, hear, or observe when you walk into an organization: office layout, dress code, how meetings run, what stories get told about the company’s past, and how people communicate. These signals are easy to notice but easy to misread because their meaning depends entirely on the deeper layers beneath them.
- Office design and physical space
- Formal rituals like all-hands meetings or performance reviews
- Language and internal shorthand unique to the organization
- How people behave when a senior leader enters a room
Level two: espoused values and beliefs
Espoused values are what an organization says it stands for. These are the written values on the wall, the leadership principles in the handbook, and the stated priorities that show up in strategy presentations. The problem is that espoused values often conflict with actual behavior, especially under pressure, which is where the gap between the culture a company claims and the one it actually operates on becomes visible.
When you see a team talk about transparency but bury bad news, or promote teamwork but reward individual performance exclusively, you are watching the gap between Level 1 and Level 2 play out in real time.
Level three: basic underlying assumptions
This is the deepest and most powerful layer of Schein’s model. Basic underlying assumptions are beliefs so embedded in the group that people treat them as unquestionable facts rather than deliberate choices. They are rarely discussed because they are rarely noticed.
The assumptions your team has never examined are often the ones most directly controlling what they do.
Schein argued that these invisible assumptions are the hardest layer to change because people do not consciously hold them. If you want to shift culture at a fundamental level, this is the layer you must eventually reach and work through directly.
Practical culture levers leaders can use every day
Understanding organizational culture and leadership as a theory is useful, but the real work happens in the daily choices you make as a leader. Culture is not shaped during annual reviews or off-site strategy sessions. It is shaped in the small, repeated interactions that happen in hallways, on calls, and in the margins of meetings where no one thinks they are being observed.
What you pay attention to in public
Your team tracks what captures your attention because attention signals priority. When you ask follow-up questions about a specific metric in every meeting, that metric becomes important. When you walk past a problem without acknowledging it, you signal that the problem is acceptable. The most direct lever you have over culture is where you consistently direct your focus, because your focus tells people what the group is actually optimizing for.
Keep a simple record of what you commented on, questioned, or praised in the last five team interactions. The pattern you find is a direct read on what your team currently believes you care about most.
How you handle mistakes
How you respond to failure is one of the most culture-defining moments available to you as a leader. Teams that hide problems have usually learned to hide them because past leaders punished the messenger. Teams that surface problems early and solve them fast have almost always been led by someone who separated accountability from blame and treated errors as information rather than evidence of weakness.
The next time something goes wrong on your team, your response will teach a lesson that lasts longer than any values statement you have ever written.
What you celebrate and who you promote
Celebration and promotion decisions are public cultural signals, whether you intend them that way or not. When you recognize someone in front of the group, you are telling everyone watching what kind of performance this team values. When you promote someone to a leadership role, you are showing the entire organization what leadership looks like here.
Align both of these levers with the culture you want, not the culture you inherited. Over time, consistent recognition patterns reshape what people believe is worth pursuing inside your organization.
How to assess and measure culture in a useful way
Most leaders sense when their organizational culture and leadership are out of alignment, but they struggle to name exactly what is off. Culture assessment gives you something more useful than intuition: concrete patterns you can act on. The goal is not to produce a perfect culture score. The goal is to identify the specific gaps between the culture you intend and the one your team is actually living.
Start with behavioral observation
Before you run any survey or hold any workshop, spend time watching how your team behaves when they think no one important is looking. Sit in on a meeting you do not normally attend. Watch who speaks, who stays quiet, and how disagreement gets handled. The behavior you observe in unguarded moments is a more reliable read on actual culture than any self-reported data you will collect later.
Pay specific attention to how information moves across your organization. In high-trust cultures, bad news travels up fast because people believe leaders will use it constructively. In low-trust cultures, problems get filtered, softened, or buried before they reach anyone with authority to address them. The speed and honesty of information flow tells you a great deal about the health of what you have built.
If you want to know what your culture is, watch what people do when they have a choice and no one is grading them.
Ask the right questions directly
Structured conversations and short pulse surveys give you language for what observation alone cannot capture. Ask your team simple, direct questions focused on specific situations rather than abstract values. You will get far more useful answers from "What makes it hard to raise a concern here?" than from "Do you feel psychologically safe?"
A few questions worth building into a regular culture check:
- When something goes wrong, what does the team typically do first?
- Who gets recognized here, and for what specifically?
- What would a new team member learn in their first 30 days about what really matters?
- What topics does your team avoid bringing up in group settings?
The answers surface the assumptions operating at Schein’s deepest level, and that is where the most useful culture work begins.
Final thoughts
The relationship between organizational culture and leadership comes down to one practical truth: culture is not something that happens to your organization, it is something you build through every decision, every reaction, and every pattern of attention you demonstrate over time. Schein’s three-level model gives you the framework to see below the surface. The behavioral levers in this article give you the tools to act on what you find there.
Your team is already drawing conclusions about what matters here. The question is whether those conclusions match the culture you actually intend to build. Start with one lever. Watch one behavioral pattern. Close one gap between your stated values and your daily actions.
If you want to go deeper on building a team that performs under pressure and stays cohesive through real challenges, explore what Robyn Benincasa brings to leadership teams and see how world-class performance principles translate directly to your organization.