Caught in culture? patterns of organizational culture change

For organizations to stay competitive, organizational culture must constantly adapt to fit changes in the environment and organizational knowledge. Extant literature has analyzed how sudden events such as environmental jolts, threats or strategic cultural molding may change organizational culture, but the literature has neglected gradual, longitudinal changes to organizational culture. This paper presents an analysis of organizational culture change as a longitudinal organizational learning process. We use unique longitudinal interview data with 38 firms collected in 2006 and 2018 to analyze how the initial organizational culture and organizational learning change organization culture. Our findings show that organizations with different organizational cultures at the start of the studied period went through different organizational culture changes, while organizations with similar organizational cultures displayed similar organizational culture changes. This indicates that an organization’s initial culture functions as a pattern for both learning and changes in organizational culture. Even when exposed to similar environmental development, organizations are so to speak caught in culture. Our findings contribute to the literature on both organizational learning and organizational culture with a much-needed integration of these to related perspectives on organizational knowledge.