Edgar Schein’s organisational Culture Triangle: A Simple Summary

Edgar Schein’s organisational Culture Triangle

Edgar Schein’s organisational Culture triangle says that there are different layers to the cultures within organisations. There are shallow layers that have some impact on an organisations culture or which may be some indication of what a culture is actually like. There are also deeper layers which provide a much greater insight into what a culture is actually like.

The three key layers that Schein discusses are:

Artifacts

Artifacts are the visible signs of an organisational culture. They are the shallowest indicator of what an organisation’s culture is actually like. Artifacts can include things like posters, dress-codes, job-titles used and the style and design of workspaces.

While analyzing artifacts may give you some insight into what an organisation’s culture is like, they won’t provide much insight. Similarly, while changing an organisation’s artifacts might lead to some change in culture, it won’t achieve significant change.

Espoused Values

Espoused values are the things that an organisation says about its culture and ways of working. These are deeper indicators and levers of culture than artifacts, but shallower than underlying beliefs.

Espoused values include things like organisational values and behaviors, company or employee charters, team contracts, perhaps vision and mission statements and the types of things promoted through newsletters and so on.

Analyzing espoused values will provide some insight into an organisation’s culture, and changing them will provide some level of change to organisational culture. The effects though won’t be huge.

Underlying Beliefs

The underlying beliefs held by members of an organisation are significantly deeper indicators of an organisation’s culture than either its artifacts or espoused values. They reflect the way that the organisational really works on the inside.

Underlying beliefs held by employees of an organisation include assumptions about how they should work with each other. They also include beliefs about what behaviors will really lead to workplace success of failure. For example, many organisations espouse that remote working is a great thing, however employees may have underlying beliefs that you need to be physically present at work to be recognized by the organisation.

Employees’ underlying beliefs are the strongest indicator of what an organisation’s culture is actually like. This makes them the strongest levers of organisational change. However, they are also the hardest levers to influence.

We like Edgar Schein’s organisational Culture Triangle. We think it’s a simple and useful way to think about organisational culture.

In our view, leadership behaviors have a huge impact on organisational culture. Employees are not stupid. If a leader tells them to act in a certain way (espousing values) but then rewards / punishes them in a way that’s not aligned to this espoused value, they will ignore the espoused value and develop their own set of underlying beliefs and assumptions which is stronger. It makes us think of leadership saying “do what I say, not what I do”, and an employee saying, “uh, no, I’ll do what you do…”.