Leading by Leveraging Culture

02-088

Leading by Leveraging Culture

Jennifer A. Chatman1 Sandra E. Cha

1

The first author wrote this chapter while a Marvin Bower Fellow at the Harvard Business School, and is grateful for their support.

Copyright © 2002 by Jennifer A. Chatman and Sandra E. Cha Working papers are in draft form. This working paper is distributed for purposes of comment and discussion only. It may not be reproduced without permission of the copyright holder. Copies of working papers are available from the author.

Leading by Leveraging Culture

Jennifer A. Chatman1 Haas School of Business University of California Berkeley, CA 94720-1900 [e-mail] And Sandra E. Cha Harvard Business School Soldiers Field, Sherman Hall 102 Harvard University Boston, MA 02163 [e-mail]

December 11, 2001

To appear in, Subir Chowdhury (Ed), Next Generation Business Series: Leadership, Financial Times-Prentice Hall Publishers, forthcoming, 2003.

1

The first author wrote this chapter while a Marvin Bower Fellow at the Harvard Business School, and is grateful for their support.

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We occasionally get calls from prospective clients who, having heard that we consult with organizations to improve their cultures, ask us to “come on down to our organization and get us a better one.” Perhaps they are thinking that, somehow, after we have worked our culture magic, employees will be singing and dancing in their cubicles. Although this is a nice image, simply trying to make employees happy misses the power of leveraging culture. The problem is that organizational culture has become faddish, and as such, it has been over-applied and underspecified. Our goal in this chapter is to precisely clarify why culture is powerful, and provide specific criteria for developing a strong, strategically relevant culture that is likely to enhance your organization’s performance over the long haul. A few caveats apply to our discussion. First we won’t claim that by simply managing culture, leaders will

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