The Science Behind Team Culture

The Science Behind the Team Culture Framework

The TeamCulture framework was developed using ideas from Industrial and Organizational Psychology. A framework consisting of 8 distinct types of workplace culture first appeared in the Harvard Business Review’s “The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture” by Boris Groysberg, Jeremiah Lee, Jesse Price, and J. Yo-Jud Cheng (2018). Their “integrated culture framework” describes organizational culture along two dimensions. Our framework includes both of these dimensions (plus a third that we’ll discuss below). The Team Culture dimensions Style (Collaborative vs. Independent) and Approach (Structured vs. Dynamic)are derived from what Groysberg et al called “People Interactions” and “Response to Change” (HBR 2018). They summarize the dimension People Interactions this way:

“An organization’s orientation toward people interactions and coordination will fall on a spectrum from highly independent to highly interdependent. Cultures that lean toward [independent] place greater value on autonomy, individual action, and competition. Those that lean toward [interdependent] emphasize integration, managing relationships, and coordinating group effort. People in such cultures tend to collaborate and to see success through the lens of the group.” - HBR, 2018

Following this pattern, the Team Culture framework recognizes teams as having a Style of work that is either independent or collaborative.

Groysberg et al describe the dimension Response to Change as follows:

“Whereas some cultures emphasize stability—prioritizing consistency, predictability, and maintenance of the status quo—others emphasize flexibility, adaptability, and receptiveness to change. Those that favor stability tend to follow rules, use control structures such as seniority-based staffing, reinforce hierarchy, and strive for efficiency. Those that favor flexibility tend to prioritize innovation, openness, diversity, and a longer-term orientation.” - Groysberg et al. The Leader’s Guide to Corporate Culture. HBR. 2018.

Our Team Culture framework uses this notion of Response to Change to measure whether a team has a dynamic approach to work, or a structured one.

The third dimension of Team Culture was informed by Robert E. Quinn and Kim S. Cameron’s “Culture Typology”. Like Groysberg et al, Quinn and Cameron developed a two-dimensional framework to describe organizational culture. Also like Groysberg et al, they recognized response to change as one of the two dimensions of culture (Quinn and Cameron’s work actually predates Groysberg et al and helped shape their thinking). Rather than recognizing People Interactions as the other dimension, Quinn and Cameron describe organizational cultures as having “orientations” or “focuses” that are either internal or external.

 “[S]ome organizations are viewed as effective if they have harmonious internal characteristics… Others are judged to be effective if they are focused on interacting or competing with others outside their boundaries.” - Robert E. Quinn and Kim S. Cameron, DIAGNOSING AND CHANGING ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE. 2006.

When thinking about the best way to measure the cultures of teams, these three dimensions emerged as the most proven and useful metrics. We are lucky to be undertaking our mission at a time when so much rigorous exploration has already been done in this field. We are taking the next steps in this exploration, and applying this updated framework to the challenge of finding every person a job that they love.

Why “Team” Culture?

You have likely noticed that most prior research addresses “Organizational” culture, or “Company” culture. So why do we focus on “Team” culture?

In order to find people jobs they love, we focus on the experience of work. We understand that many companies are too large and too widely dispersed for their culture to be experienced on a regular basis by the average employee. This can be true even when leadership takes a real interest in developing a company culture. The vast majority of people only interact with a fraction of the other employees at their company.

Culture exists in the interactions between people, and it is felt most strongly in groups that regularly interact and work together. Teams are groups of people who regularly work closely together, so we focus our efforts on understanding, managing, and hiring for team culture.