Organizational culture is widely emphasized but often poorly understood. Leaders frequently proclaim culture as a strategic priority, launching values campaigns, wellbeing programs, revising mission statements, and delivering impassioned talks about trust and purpose. These visible efforts can ring hollow when everyday decisions, incentives, and behaviours do not align with stated values. Amplified rhetoric without matching action creates perceptions of performative culture and breeds cynicism. Sustainable cultural change requires alignment between leaders' words, observable practices, systems, and structural supports so that claimed values are reinforced through consistent behaviour and organizational processes.
Culture is one of the most talked-about priorities in leadership, yet one of the least consistently understood. Executives routinely declare it is a strategic imperative. They launch values campaigns, unveil wellbeing programs, revise mission statements, and deliver impassioned talks about trust and purpose. But for all this activity, something isn't working: in many organizations, we've seen that the louder leaders talk about culture, the more performative it feels-especially when actions don't align with the message.
Chidiebere Ogbonnaya is a Professor of Human Resource Management at King's Business School, King's College London. Yasin Rofcanin is a Professor of Organizational Psychology and HRM at the School of Management, University of Bath. Tomasz Gorny is a Research Assistant in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King's College London, London. Marcello Mariani is a professor of management at Henley Business School and the University of Bologna, Italy.
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