Workplace Culture to Drive Behavior: How to Harness Its Power

Use Workplace Culture to Drive Behavior
Effective leaders understand that workplace culture is one of the most powerful levers available to shape organizational behavior. When intentionally aligned, culture does more than reinforce expectations.  Our organizational alignment research found that the ability of workplace culture to drive behavior has a 40% impact on:

• Driving revenue growth.
• Improving profitability.
• Accelerating strategy execution.
• Engaging and retaining top talent.

Although CEOs and senior leaders clearly influence culture and often have an outsized impact on team norms, culture does not operate as a simple top-down force. In reality, workplace culture rarely mirrors a model where one individual dictates behavior for the group. Instead, it is shaped and sustained by shared business practices, peer reinforcement, and the everyday decisions people make across the organization.

Workplace Culture Exists by Design or by Default
Only under rare circumstances — and typically with an exceptionally strong and deliberate leader — can a single individual exert more influence over a corporate culture than the collective workforce. In most organizations, culture is not dictated by one person but emerges through shared norms, routines, and reinforcements.

Whether intentionally designed or allowed to form by default, a company’s culture shapes how employees think, decide, and behave every day — for better or worse. Over time, those who do not align with the prevailing culture tend to disengage, lose effectiveness, or ultimately exit the organization. Culture, then, becomes a powerful sorting mechanism, quietly determining who succeeds, who struggles, and who stays.

Examples of The Power of Workplace Culture to Drive Behavior

• The Power of Culture for Harm
  The influence of organizational culture extends far beyond corporate settings. Take professional cycling, for example, where unethical behavior has, at times, become normalized.  The most notorious case was the doping scandal, in which many top international cyclists, including Lance Armstrong, were found to be using performance-enhancing drugs.

  More recently, the sport has grappled with “mechanical doping,” where tiny motors hidden in bike frames allowed riders to gain unfair speed advantages.  From the outside, it is clear that the prevailing culture in professional cycling has been one of win-at-all-costs.  While there will always be individuals willing to bend the rules, this cultural expectation effectively incentivized cheating, creating a climate where unethical behavior became the norm rather than the exception.

  This is a stark illustration of culture’s power to drive behavior — for harm.

• The Power of Culture for Good
  Culture can shape behavior for positive change just as profoundly. Consider a time in the U.S. when tossing trash from car windows was common — people did it simply because everyone else did.  The turning point came with the highway beautification campaign championed by Lady Bird Johnson.

  Through awareness, advocacy, and visible social expectations, the culture shifted: littering became socially unacceptable. Habits changed, and even children played a role, reminding their parents not to litter.  Today, throwing trash out of a car window carries a stigma — it simply doesn’t “fit” with the culture. Witnessing someone do it is jarring, much like seeing someone light a cigarette on an airplane.

  What was once normal behavior is now widely recognized as unacceptable, illustrating the extraordinary power of culture to shape collective behavior for good.

How to Harness the Power Workplace Culture to Drive Behavior
Think of corporate culture as how things truly get done in an organization. It includes the known and unspoken assumptions and corporate values that drive daily behaviors and practices. Though many still mistakenly consider workplace culture as “soft HR stuff,” we know from assessing workplace cultures that it can have a measurable impact on performance.

To harness its power:

1. Align the Executive Team
   The executives who set corporate strategy must also define the culture needed to execute it effectively. Start by securing the leadership team’s commitment to the behaviors and values that matter most. This typically begins with a focused strategy session, where leaders align on a set of ten critical cultural dimensions that will guide decision-making, shape norms, and drive organizational performance.
2. Assess Your Current Culture
   After the executive team defines the needed culture for your strategy, the next step is to take a clear-eyed look at how the organization actually experiences its current culture. The goal is to uncover gaps in organizational health and strategic alignment — differences between how things are and how they need to be — to ensure you have the foundation necessary to achieve your strategic objectives.
3. Align Ways of Working
   After analyzing the culture assessment, the next step is to align how teams actually work with the strategy. This means reshaping processes, behaviors, and workflows so that the way work gets done supports both organizational goals and the needs of the people executing them, creating a culture where strategy and day-to-day operations reinforce each other.
4. Sustain the Needed Culture
   The final — and ongoing — step in cultural transformation is to intentionally embed the desired behaviors, capabilities, and ways of working. Leaders must model these behaviors, reinforce them through recognition and consequences, and ensure they become an enduring part of how the organization operates, creating a culture that makes it easy to execute the strategy in the short- and long-term.

The Bottom Line
Be intentional about the workplace culture you cultivate — every norm, value, and behavior sends a signal. The culture you shape affects not only how your people think, decide, and perform, but also the long-term success of your business. Culture is not incidental; it is a strategic force that can accelerate results or quietly undermine them.

To learn more about using workplace culture to drive behavior and higher performance, download The 3 “C’s” of Culture that You Must Get Right to Create High Performance

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.