In this video Mark Murphy, founder of LeadershipIQ, outlines a four‑type model of organizational culture—Social, Dependable, Enterprising, and Hierarchical—positioned on collaborative vs. competitive and creative vs. logical axes. He describes the characteristics of each type, explains how personal preferences and organizational purpose influence which culture is most suitable, and presents survey data showing gaps between the cultures organizations currently have and the ones employees desire. Murphy urges viewers to take LeadershipIQ’s organizational culture test to discover their actual culture, then receive a tailored deep‑dive video. He explains how culture assessment is embedded in LeadershipIQ’s employee engagement surveys to identify desired culture per department and guide concrete actions. Finally, he connects culture to hiring, detailing how Hiring‑for‑Attitude services translate culture goals into interview questions and hiring criteria that match personalities to the target culture.
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Hi, I'm Mark Murphy, founder of Leadership IQ, and welcome to this video on organizational culture. There are really 4 major types of organizational culture: the social, the enterprising, the dependable, and hierarchical. And while there are dozens of factors that go into determining what kind of organizational culture you actually have, we can think in simple terms of cultures being broken out in terms of whether or not they are collaborative versus competitive, and creative versus logical. Now, with that, let's take a look at the four major types of organizational culture. The social organizational culture is a relaxed culture, so it is both collaborative and creative. So it's relaxed, it's casual, it's going to blur the lines between professional relationships and friendships, and emotional well-being is going to be heavily prioritized in an organization like this. This kind of company culture is going to be highly trusting. People are going to be highly collaborative. They're going to work across lines together, and they're going to work to brainstorm and generate new ideas. In the Dependable culture, this is an organization that is both collaborative but also logical, which means in practical terms that it's going to be very process-focused. There's going to be a task force, a protocol, a process, for virtually every major procedure in this type of organizational culture. So there's going to be standards, efficiency, there's going to be codes of conduct, there's going to be a high degree of color within the lines, and here is the process you follow for virtually everything you can think of. Now, on the flip side of that is the enterprising culture. Now, this kind of corporate culture is often known as an entrepreneurial organizational culture. So this is the one where really it's a meritocracy in the ideal version of a meritocracy. That is, the best idea is going to win regardless of who has that idea and what their position is within the organization. So creativity, intelligence are going to be valued. It doesn't so much matter who you know, like referent power, for example, not super important in an enterprise and culture. It's less about who you know and more about what you know. So there is a bit of competitiveness here. This organization is more competitive, but the competition can be perfectly friendly. But it's really about who has the best idea, who came up with it, and that's the idea we're going to go with, even if this person is, you know, 6 months on the job and doesn't have a lot of social clout. And then of course we have the hierarchical culture. This is very different than, for example, the social organizational culture. So this is one that is very traditional. The hierarchical culture is one where you could come in from the outside and just based on the size of people's offices know who has what power inside the organization. This is a company where titular power formal power or role-based power— those are all synonyms— is critically important. So this is one where tradition is important, paying your dues, working your way up the ladder is important. This is not an organization where lateral moves are super pronounced. This is one where it's very much an up or out kind of organizational culture. Now, when we look at these kinds of cultures, one of the big questions we have to ask, of course, is, well, is one of these cultures better than the other? And the answer is a little bit complicated in the sense that one of these cultures is not necessarily better, but a couple of these cultures are a bit more preferred. So for example, when we ask people and we give them descriptions of these different types of organizational culture, and we ask them which of these types of organizational culture is your ideal Social culture comes out as number 1. The dependable culture comes out as number 2. Enterprising, number 3. And hierarchical, number 4. Now, what's interesting about this is 2 major things. Number 1, depending on what kind of organization you're in and what kind of personality you have, this is not a universal. It is not the case that every single person desires a social culture. For example, people that are Highly ambitious tend to prefer the enterprising culture. People that believe in dotting every I and crossing every T, they tend to actually like the dependable culture. And so depending on your personality, there is not one magically correct or best organizational culture. It very much depends on who you are, what the purpose of the organization is, and what it is you're trying to accomplish. The other factor that becomes important in this is understanding what kind of organizational culture you actually have. And this is where I strongly encourage you to take the organizational culture test on this page, because far more important than knowing what your preferred culture is, is knowing what kind of culture you actually have. And so we can see significant gaps when we look at, for example, how many people have a, a social culture versus how many people want a social culture, you can see that 34% of people have a social culture, 31% of them actually want a social culture. 37% of people have a dependable culture, but only 28% of people actually want a dependable culture. Now, 24% of people want an enterprising culture, but only 10% of people actually have an enterprising organizational culture. And hierarchical, 16% want it, 19% have it. So the real first step for you is to take the organizational culture test, figure out what kind of culture you actually have. Then when you get your results, what we're gonna do is send you a deep dive video to further explore your particular organizational culture and show you the kinds of personalities that tend to work well in your organizational culture. How would you hire for it? How would you change to that particular kind of culture? And is that even advisable? So with that, thank you for visiting this page. Hope to, uh, have you take the assessment and really discover and dive deep into the kind of organizational culture you've got. And is that the right one given your particular type of organization? Now, I want to share an idea that is hugely important when it comes to corporate cultures, and it is that corporate cultures, your organizational culture, has a huge impact on both your employee engagement and the kind of people you hire. So for example, we actually build a corporate culture assessment into our employee engagement survey. So as you know, LeadershipIQ is a very big employee engagement survey company, a top-rated firm, and one of the things we do is actually assess assess what kind of culture does your company currently have, because that's critical to know, but also what kind of corporate culture do your employees actually want. We see a lot of organizations say we want to have more of a, for example, an enterprising culture. We want to have more of an entrepreneurial culture, and that's lovely, but if we don't know that that's the culture that our employees actually want, we are going to fail miserably in trying to achieve this. So one of the things we will actually do is take a look at the desired culture for every department in the organization. So for example, if I discover that, you know what, right now my sales department does not have much of an enterprising culture, but that's the culture that the vast majority of employees want, well, now I know exactly what specific specific actions I need to undertake as a leader in this department to start to create more of an enterprising culture. If I discover that my employees really want more of a dependable culture, more of a social culture, I now know just based on being able to assess every department in this organization, I know exactly what actions I need to take. So whenever you do an employee engagement survey, and clearly we do this in our employee engagement survey, we actually build in a corporate culture assessment right into the survey so you can figure out exactly, do you have the right culture? Is the culture you're building the culture that your employees actually want? And if not, how do we make that change? The other thing that we do that is super important is we use a culture assessment to figure out partly what kinds of people you should hire in your organization. So we identify, based on the kind of corporate culture your organization is trying to get to, what kinds of personalities, what sort of attitudes should you actually be hiring. If you want a collaborative culture, for example, a social culture, well then we need people that can build relationships, maintain harmony. If we want a very dependable culture, Well, then we're gonna need to hire people with high levels of conscientiousness who can dot the i's and cross the t's and move very methodically. If we want more of an entrepreneurial culture, we need people that are actually gonna enjoy a bit of competitive pressure, that actually really like change. And so what we do in our Hiring for Attitude consultations is we will actually build for you interview questions and answer guidelines that help you evaluate every single candidate that comes in the door to assess whether or not they are actually going to fit with the organizational culture you're trying to build. So if this is something that's of interest to you, just check on the form below and learn more about our employee engagement survey that uses corporate culture in there. And also check out our Hiring for Attitude services based on my bestselling book of the same name. Where we're going to help you actually hire people that are gonna fit your organizational culture.
