What organizational behavior looks like when we stop pretending culture is just a list of values.
I once described my job as therapy for organizations.
It was meant as a joke.
Mostly.
Because spend enough time with organizations and you start noticing something peculiar: there seems to be something remarkably similar to character or personality.
There is the athlete. Strong. Competitive. Performance-driven. Likes targets, decisive action and people who can keep up. Vulnerability is perfectly acceptable, provided it doesn’t interfere with the quarterly results.
There is the diva. Brilliant, charismatic and slightly offended by the suggestion that normal rules might also apply to her. She has a remarkable history, strong opinions about how things should be done and usually at least one legendary founder or former CEO still present in organizational folklore.
And then there is the anxious overachiever. Twelve priorities, six transformation programs, three reorganizations and a nagging suspicion that everybody else is moving faster. Permanently busy becoming better. Permanently slightly stressed about it.
There are others, of course. Organizations, like people, have proven remarkably resistant to fitting neatly into three categories.
None of these organizations has a personality, of course.
And yet somehow, they do.
We recognize organizations. Not just by their products, logos or office furniture, but by the way they behave.
How quickly are decisions made? What happens when somebody disagrees? What gets rewarded? What makes people nervous? What does the organization do when something goes wrong? Which stories are told repeatedly? What can everybody see but nobody comfortably mention?
Over time, these patterns become surprisingly persistent. People leave. Leaders change. Strategies are rewritten. The values on the website receive a tasteful redesign.
And still, somehow, the organization remains recognizably itself.
The diva may have a new strategy, a new leadership team and a beautifully refreshed purpose statement. She is still a diva. She just changed outfits.
There is research behind this intuition. Organizational identity has long explored what members perceive as central, distinctive and relatively enduring about an organization. Research on organizational personality goes even further and examines the human characteristics people attribute to organizations.
But there is another reason I find the idea useful.
An organization’s personality may help explain why even clear and repeatedly communicated intentions fail to change what an organization actually does.
A founder can articulate a principle with absolute clarity. A board can repeat a strategic priority for years. Leaders can carefully craft the same message in town halls, presentations and leadership meetings.
And still, the organization subtly but firmly continues doing something else.
That may look like a communication problem. Sometimes it is. But sometimes the message simply collides with what the organization has learned about how things really work.
This is where Eric Ries’s recent book Incorruptible becomes interesting. Ries argues that even organizations founded with strong principles can drift away from them because good intentions are not enough. Ownership, governance, incentives and decision-making structures quietly shape behavior – sometimes more powerfully than the intentions of founders or leaders.
He uses the language of protecting an organization’s soul. I find that surprisingly close to what we are looking at here.
Because perhaps an organization’s character doesn’t live in what its leaders repeatedly say.
It lives in what the organization repeatedly does.
And that makes the metaphor particularly useful when we stop asking what personality an organization has and start asking how that personality came to be.
Organizations don’t wake up one morning and decide to become anxious overachievers. They learn to be that way.
A company repeatedly rewarded for heroic last-minute delivery may learn that planning matters less than rescue. An organization in which bad news travels badly may learn optimism. One that has survived through relentless competition may learn that showing weakness is dangerous. A company shaped by a powerful founder may continue responding according to that founder’s assumptions long after the founder has left.
Eventually, yesterday’s successful response becomes today’s normal behavior.
And this is where organizational personality becomes more than a cute metaphor. What looks like character may actually be values, history and collective experience made durable through structures, incentives, rituals, artifacts, routines and relationships.
The athlete isn’t simply competitive. Look at what gets promoted.
The diva isn’t simply difficult. Look at where exceptions are made.
The anxious overachiever doesn’t need another resilience workshop. Look at how many priorities the system permits simultaneously.
Suddenly, organizational development starts to resemble psychotherapy a little more than I intended when I made the joke.
Not because organizations need a couch, but because persistent patterns rarely disappear simply because someone has decided they should. Understanding them means asking what purpose they once served, what continues to reinforce them and whether they still help the organization today.
That also changes how we might think about resistance to change. We announce a new strategy, redesign the operating model or introduce a different way of working and then become frustrated when familiar behaviors reappear. But if those behaviors are rooted in years of collective experience and are still reinforced by the surrounding system, their persistence is hardly surprising.
We may think we are introducing change to an organization. The organization, meanwhile, is meeting that change as itself.
And maybe that is what makes organizational change so difficult – and so interesting.
Before asking an organization to become something different, it may be worth understanding who it has learned to be.
Author: Michaela Kotnik & AI sparring partner & editorial collaborator: GPT-5.6 Sol (OpenAI)
Albert, S. & Whetten, D. A. (1985). Organizational Identity. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9716518/
Slaughter, J. E., Zickar, M. J., Highhouse, S. & Mohr, D. C. (2004). Personality Trait Inferences About Organizations: Development of a Measure and Assessment of Construct Validity. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(1), 85–103. https://doi.org/10.1037/0021-9010.89.1.85
Ries, E. (2026). Incorruptible: Why the Best Organizations Still Fail and How to Fix Them. https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Incorruptible/Eric-Ries/9798893311860
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