What Role Do Founders and Owners Have in Establishing Organizational Culture?

When it comes to understanding the culture or shared environment of a particular business or organization, there can be several factors to consider. In general, experts believe that culture is established over time-it takes a while for a company or organization to really develop a collection of policies, values and beliefs that are shared among all the employees and/or workers. The initial founders or owners DO have a role to play in the creation of company or organizational culture-while time may cause the culture to evolve in unpredictable ways, the initial influencers are important.

When an individual or group of individuals start a company or organization, they normally have some fairly specific ideas about what they want to happen-whether it is focused on making money, serving the public or providing a place to work that satisfies certain desires, the owners and founders tend to have some very clear ideas about what sort of work environment they would like to create. These initial goals and efforts can have a lasting effect on the culture of a company or organization.

For example, if a person decides to start a business not only to provide a service that has been missing in the community, but to create a work environment that is consensual based, flexible and where employees can set their own hours and have a great deal of autonomy over their jobs, this is going to create a company or organization culture that supports these ideals. It will be quite different if the owner or founder wants to create a company where he or she can be "in charge" and where the positions are structured in a "top down" fashion and the "boss" has a strong need to write policies on how employees will behave.

Of course, other realities will influence the company culture as well-the actual employees who come to work for the company and external factors such as market changes, competitors and the overall economic situation will all work to shape what sort of a work environment evolves. Over time, of course, the owners and/or founders may become less important and influential on the culture-especially if the organization becomes quite large (smaller businesses or organizations who retain strong founders and owners might be different.)