How Organisations Shape Us: Culture, Control, and the Self at Work

I have spent much of my research career immersed in organisations — listening to how people speak, watching how they behave, and paying close attention to what often goes unsaid. Again and again, I have been struck by the same realisation: organisations do far more than coordinate work. They shape how employees experience themselves.

Culture in organisations is rarely neutral. It is lived, felt, negotiated, and often internalised in ways that influence how people think, feel, and act — sometimes without their conscious awareness. Values, rituals, language, and expectations do not simply guide behaviour; they reach into identity, emotion, and self-understanding. These processes are frequently known as “engagement,” “belonging,” or “high performance,” however they should also be examined for the subtle forms of control they can enact.

In this article, I draw on organisational ethnography to explore the dynamic relationship between organisational culture, cultural control, and the self. My aim is not to offer a prescriptive model for managing culture, but to provide a critical lens for understanding how culture operates in practice — particularly how it shapes employees’ subjective experiences in contemporary workplaces.

By bringing together insights from organisational studies, sociology, and ethnographic research, I argue that culture, control, and identity cannot be examined in isolation. Instead, they form an interconnected system that governs meaning, belonging, and behaviour at work. Making these processes visible is essential — not only for organisational ethnographers, but for anyone concerned with agency, autonomy, and human dignity in organisational life. Modern organisations don’t just organise work — they shape how we think, feel, and experience ourselves.

Behind mission statements, values posters, and team rituals lie powerful cultural forces that subtly guide employee behaviour and identity. Understanding these forces matters, not only for scholars, but for anyone navigating contemporary organisational life.

Drawing on organisational ethnography, this article explores three deeply interconnected ideas: organisational culture, cultural control, and the self. Together, they help explain how workplaces influence employee subjectivity — often in ways that are invisible, normalised, and emotionally demanding.

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Why Organisational Ethnography Matters

Organisational ethnography involves immersive, long-term engagement with workplaces. Ethnographers observe everyday interactions, language, rituals, and behaviours to understand how meaning is constructed from within. This method is uniquely suited to revealing implicit forms of cultural control — the subtle expectations, emotional norms, and behavioural rules that govern organisational life. Unlike surveys or performance metrics, ethnography captures how employees actually experience work. At its best, organisational ethnography doesn’t just describe culture — it illuminates consciousness, challenging taken-for-granted assumptions that shape how people think, feel, and act at work

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Organisational Culture: Unity, Difference, and Ambiguity

Since the 1980s, “organisational culture” has been a central concept in management thinking. Early research largely promoted the idea that strong, unified cultures could be designed and managed to improve performance. Influential frameworks encouraged leaders to align values, beliefs, and behaviours, often presenting culture as a shared, cohesive system. But this view has serious limitations.

Culture Is Rarely Singular

Critical scholars challenged the idea that organisations have one unified culture. Instead, workplaces are better understood as sites of multiple subcultures, shaped by occupation, hierarchy, gender, ethnicity, and power.

Research shows that:

• Some subcultures reinforce dominant organisational values

• Others remain orthogonal, coexisting without conflict

• Still others act as countercultures, quietly resisting or undermining official narratives

More recent work extends this insight further, showing how microcultures emerge within subcultures — particularly during times of stress or uncertainty — offering employees psychological protection and autonomy.

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Ambiguity Is Part of the System

Beyond unity and difference lies fragmentation — cultural ambiguity, contradiction, and instability. Employees often navigate inconsistent messages about values, priorities, and expectations, creating confusion and emotional strain. Understanding organisational culture therefore requires moving beyond surface-level symbols and slogans to examine how meaning is negotiated — and contested — in everyday work life.

Cultural Control: How Organisations Shape Behaviour and Belonging

Culture does more than create meaning — it also controls language and behaviour. Cultural control refers to the ways organisations guide employee behaviour not through force or surveillance alone, but through socialisation, behavioural engineering, norms, and emotional management.

From Overt Control to Normative Control

Over time, organisational control has shifted from explicit rules to more subtle mechanisms. Instead of telling employees exactly what to do, organisations increasingly shape how employees want to behave.

This process relies on:

• Ideology (shared narratives about purpose and identity)

• Rewards and recognition tied to “appropriate” behaviour

• Emotional norms that define what feelings are acceptable at work

The most powerful form of this is normative control — where employees internalise organisational values so deeply that compliance feels voluntary, meaningful, even self-expressive.

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Autonomy as Control

Paradoxically, autonomy itself can function as a control mechanism. When employees believe they are free, creative, and self-directed, they may be less likely to question underlying constraints.

This creates a system where:

• Commitment replaces compliance

• Identity becomes tied to organisational success

• Resistance becomes emotionally costly

Normative control works best when it feels invisible.

The Self at Work: Identity, Performance, and Emotional Labour

To fully understand cultural control, we must examine its impact on the self. Sociological theories show that identity is not fixed — it is formed and reshaped through social interaction. At work, employees constantly interpret feedback, expectations, and symbolic cues to understand who they are supposed to be.

Performing the Organisational Self

Erving Goffman famously described social life as a series of performances. In workplaces, employees manage impressions through front-stage behaviour (meetings, presentations, customer interactions) while reserving back-stage spaces for more authentic expression.

But when organisational expectations penetrate too deeply, even backstage spaces can disappear.

Emotional Labour and Estrangement

Building on this idea, research on emotional labour shows how employees are often required to manage feelings — not just actions. Over time, this can create tension between:

• The “real” self

• The organisationally approved self

When emotions are consistently shaped to meet organisational needs, employees may experience alienation, stress, or a fragmented sense of identity. In extreme cases, individuals normalise this split as a survival strategy — at the cost of personal wholeness

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A Framework for Seeing What’s Usually Hidden

To help organisational ethnographers — and reflective practitioners — make sense of these dynamics, a practical analytical framework emerges from this research.

Key areas of attention include:

• Organisational cultures from integration, differentiation, and fragmentation perspectives

• Subcultures and microcultures

• Managerial ideology and normative control mechanisms

• Front-stage and back-stage sites of enactment where interactions take place

• Language, rituals, rules, and emotional norms

By observing these elements over time and in context, ethnographers can uncover how culture and control intersect with identity — revealing what employees live, not just what organisations claim.

Why This Matters Now

In an era of constant organisational change, hybrid work, and increasing emotional demands, understanding how workplaces shape employee subjectivity is more important than ever.

Organisational ethnography offers more than insight — it offers ethical responsibility. By making hidden forms of control visible, it creates space for reflection, agency, and more humane organisational practices.

A Call to Action for Human Resources, People & Culture teams, and Senior Leaders

If culture shapes how people think, feel, and experience themselves at work, then those who design, steward, and reinforce culture carry an ethical responsibility — not just a strategic one.

For Human Resources, People and Culture leaders, and senior executives, this research offers a clear invitation: move beyond managing culture as a performance tool and begin engaging with it as a lived human system. Values, rituals, leadership behaviours, engagement frameworks, and wellbeing initiatives do not merely influence outcomes — they shape identities, emotional norms, and employees’ sense of self.

This means asking harder questions.

• How do our values and “ways of working” implicitly reward conformity over reflection?

• Where do we mistake commitment for consent?

• When we speak of autonomy, do employees truly experience it — or is it narrowly defined within invisible boundaries?

• What emotional labour are we normalising, celebrating, or ignoring?

Leaders are often well-intentioned. Yet normative control rarely announces itself. It operates quietly through language, expectations, recognition systems, and symbolic practices that feel benign, even positive. Over time, these mechanisms can blur the boundary between organisational identity and personal identity — leaving employees carrying emotional and psychological costs that remain unseen.

The call to action, therefore, is not to abandon culture-building — but to practice it with reflexivity, humility, and courage.

This involves:

• Creating genuine back-stage spaces where dissent, ambiguity, and discomfort can be expressed safely

• Treating culture surveys and engagement metrics as starting points, not truths

• Listening closely to subcultures and microcultures, especially during times of uncertainty and change

• Recognising that wellbeing cannot coexist with emotional compliance disguised as belonging

Most importantly, it requires leaders to examine their own role in sustaining cultural narratives that may limit agency, silence difference, or demand emotional alignment at the expense of authenticity.

Culture will always influence behaviour. The question is whether it does so consciously and ethically, or invisibly and coercively.

For leaders willing to look beneath the surface, this research offers not a criticism, but an opportunity: to build organisational cultures that respect employees’ right to think, feel, and act with awareness — and to lead in ways that honour both performance and personhood.

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Dr Kiaos is a researcher and practitioner working at the intersection of organisational culture, change, public sector reform and mental health. She is the founder of Mind Culture Life Australia, supporting leaders and People and Culture teams to understand how work really gets done during change.

References

Kiaos, T.A. (2024). Organizational culture, cultural control, and the self: directions for organizational ethnographers. Organizational Cultures, 24(2), 37. https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-8013/CGP/v24i02/37-60