Why Organisational Culture Looks One Way — and Feels Another

As a researcher, I spend a great deal of time watching what people do at work — but even more time listening to what they cannot easily say.

Over years of ethnographic and qualitative research, I have repeatedly encountered the same pattern across organisations, industries, and roles: employees speak one way in formal settings and another way everywhere else. They perform confidence, alignment, and commitment on the surface, while privately negotiating doubt, ambivalence, frustration, or moral tension beneath it. These are not isolated moments of “inconsistency.” They are patterned, learned, and deeply cultural.

This observation is what led me to develop the research underpinning this article. I was not interested in culture as a static set of values or a diagnostic score. I was interested in how culture works — how it is enacted through language, behaviour, emotion, and identity as people move through different organisational spaces and relationships.

My research asks a deceptively simple question: what happens to the self when organisational culture is strong, normative, and morally charged? And more importantly, how can we interpret employees’ subjective experiences with greater depth and precision, rather than flattening them into engagement metrics or behavioural checklists?

The framework that informs this Thought Leadership Article emerged from that question. It brings together managerial ideology, normative control, organisational culture, and concepts of the self to make visible what is often hidden in plain sight: the ongoing work employees do to manage impressions, regulate emotions, and preserve belonging — sometimes at a personal cost.

This Thought Leadership Article is not written to critique organisations from a distance. It is written to slow down our thinking about culture, power, and personhood at work — and to invite leaders, practitioners, and researchers alike to look more carefully at what organisational life feels like from the inside.

Most organisations believe they understand their culture. They can describe it confidently: the values, the behaviours, the rituals, the leadership language. Culture is presented as something visible, coherent, and largely shared. And yet, when you listen closely to employees — not in surveys, but in everyday interactions — a very different picture emerges.

What people say in meetings often differs from what they say in corridors.What they perform in front of leaders may not match how they feel behind closed doors. And what appears as “alignment” can, under closer inspection, be careful self-management. This gap between cultural appearance and lived experience is not accidental. It is produced — and maintained — through ideology, norms, and expectations that quietly shape how employees present themselves at work.

My research set out to understand this gap more precisely by developing an interpretative framework that brings together four things organisations often examine separately: managerial ideology, normative control, organisational culture, and the self 

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Culture Is Not Just What an Organisation Has — It’s What People Perform

Much of the mainstream culture literature treats culture as something an organisation has: a set of values, beliefs, or behaviours that can be measured, managed, and improved. But from an interpretative and ethnographic perspective, culture is something an organisation is. It is continuously produced through language, behaviour, rituals, and expectations — particularly those enacted by people with authority.

Senior leaders and executives play a powerful role here. Through speeches, narratives, values statements, and symbolic actions, they communicate an authoritative system of meaning — what the organisation stands for, who belongs, and what “good” looks like. This is not neutral communication. It forms what I describe as managerial ideology: a stream of discourse that shapes how employees understand their roles, their worth, and their relationship to the organisation.

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When Commitment Replaces Compliance

Modern organisations rarely rely on overt control. Instead, they increasingly depend on normative control — encouraging employees to internalise organisational values so deeply that acting in the organisation’s interests feels natural, moral, even self-defining.

Under normative control, employees do not comply because they must. They comply because they believe they should.

This form of control is powerful precisely because it feels voluntary. Autonomy, purpose, and belonging are offered — but within carefully defined boundaries. Over time, employees learn what emotions, attitudes, and expressions are acceptable, and which ones are risky. The result is not silence, but performance.

Front Stage and Back Stage Sites of Enactment: The Hidden Work of Being “Professional”

To understand how culture is lived, my framework introduces six sites of enactment:

• Front stage scenes, encounters, and relationships

• Back stage scenes, encounters, and relationships

In front stage sites of enactment, employees perform alignment. Language is polished. Emotions are regulated. Loyalty is visible. These performances are often sincere — but typically they are also carefully managed.

In back stage sites of enactment, a different cultural reality appears. Here, employees express doubt, frustration, irony, or quiet resistance. Microcultures emerge, offering psychological safety and shared understanding that may not exist elsewhere in the organisation.

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Neither space is more “real” than the other. But the tension between them carries a cost.

The Cost Is Carried by the Self

When employees are required to continuously manage how they speak, feel, and behave — particularly when those performances conflict with their internal experience — the strain is not just organisational. It is personal. This is where concepts of the self become essential.

Employees often learn to split:

• A professional self that aligns with organisational expectations

• A private self that absorbs frustration, doubt, or moral discomfort

Over time, this split can become normalised. People adapt. They cope. But they also lose something — clarity, agency, wholeness.

My framework brings psychological and sociological views of the self together to interpret these experiences, not as individual weakness, but as structured outcomes of cultural systems.

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Why This Framework Matters

This research was developed for ethnographers and qualitative researchers — but its implications extend far beyond academia.

For leaders, Human Resources, and People & Culture practitioners, the framework offers a different way of seeing culture:

• Not just as alignment, but as performance

• Not just as engagement, but as emotional investment

• Not just as values, but as systems of meaning

Most importantly, it reminds us that culture is not only something employees experience — it is something they carry, often quietly, into their sense of self. Understanding that responsibility is the first step toward building cultures that are not only effective, but humane.

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

If organisational culture shapes how people speak, feel, and experience themselves at work, then those who design, steward, and legitimise that culture carry far more responsibility than is often acknowledged.

For Human Resources, People & Culture professionals, and senior leaders, this research calls for a shift in how culture is understood and enacted. Culture cannot be reduced to values statements, engagement scores, or behavioural frameworks alone. It is a lived system of meaning — one that quietly governs belonging, legitimacy, and identity through language, ritual, and expectation.

The invitation here is not to abandon culture-building, but to practice it with greater reflexivity.

This begins by asking questions that are rarely surfaced in leadership conversations:

• Where do our cultural narratives encourage performance rather than authenticity?

• How often do we confuse alignment with agreement?

• What emotional pressure do our expectations quietly demand of employees?

  
  

Normative control does not announce itself. It operates subtly, often through well-intentioned initiatives: purpose statements, leadership models, values-based behaviours, and narratives of commitment. Over time, these can blur the boundary between organisational identity and personal identity, leaving employees to carry unspoken tension, self-regulation, and moral strain.

Human Resources and People and Culture functions are uniquely positioned to interrupt this pattern — not by policing culture, but by creating conditions for honest sensemaking through ongoing dialogue.

This means:

• Designing spaces where dissent, ambiguity, and discomfort are not only tolerated but valued

• Treating engagement data as incomplete signals rather than cultural truth

• Paying close attention to subcultures and microcultures, especially during change, restructuring, or growth

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

For senior leaders, the work begins closer to home. Every narrative you repeat, every ritual you endorse, every behaviour you reward reinforces a particular version of “who we are” — and, implicitly, who employees are allowed to be.

This research invites leaders to move beyond managing culture as a performance lever and toward engaging with it as a moral and psychological force — one that shapes not only organisational outcomes, but the inner lives of the people who make those outcomes possible. That shift is not easy. But it is necessary — and it begins with the courage to look beneath the surface.

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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. (2023). An interpretative framework for analysing managerial ideology, normative control, organizational culture and the self. Cogent Business & Management, 10(1), 2163795. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311975.2022.2163795