By Jonathan H. Westover, PhD
Listen to this article:
Abstract: This article explores Edgar Schein's influential model of organizational culture and its application for business leaders seeking to assess and influence culture within their industries. Schein defines culture as having three levels - artifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptions. By examining culture through this framework, leaders gain a nuanced understanding of both visible and unconscious drivers of employee behaviors and organizational dynamics. The article discusses how leaders can analyze each level of culture and provides industry examples from healthcare and higher education. It argues that understanding culture's deeper roots allows leaders to intentionally shape artifacts and espoused values in a way that aligns all levels and helps evolve basic assumptions over time. Using Schein's model, leaders are equipped with a practical tool for purposefully examining and impacting their unique organizational culture to cultivate high performance, fulfill missions, and drive business success.
Organizational culture plays an increasingly important role in leadership and business management. A stronger understanding of culture can help leaders drive change, enhance performance, and increase employee engagement within their organizations. Edgar Schein’s model of organizational culture provides leaders with a practical framework for analyzing, understanding, and influencing their company’s underlying assumptions, values, and behaviors.
Today we will explore Schein’s three levels of culture - artifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptions - and provide examples of how leaders can apply this model within their industries. Understanding culture at this deeper level, as Schein describes, is vital for impacting culture in a purposeful way.
Artifacts: The Surface Level of Culture
According to Schein, the most superficial manifestation of an organization's culture are its artifacts. Artifacts represent the visible products of the group, such as its:
Physical environment (architecture, layout, office design)
Language (terminology, phrases, stories told)
Visual communications (logos, marketing materials, website design)
Published values and behaviors
While artifacts indicate that something is going on within the culture, artifacts alone don't reveal the meaning behind the behaviors. For example, an open office layout may indicate a desire for collaboration, but it doesn't explain why collaboration is valued.
Leaders can begin analyzing their organization's culture by taking inventory of its artifacts. For a software company, key artifacts may include developer workspaces, coding style guides, product roadmaps, and tech blog posts. By studying these outward signs, leaders gain initial insights into how work gets done. They can then look for congruence between espoused values and actual behaviors demonstrated through artifacts.
Additionally, artifacts provide opportunities for symbolic actions. For example, after acquiring a new firm, a leader instituted "integration labs" where teams from both companies worked side-by-side in shared spaces. This artifact helped blend technical cultures by exposing people to new ways of thinking and fostered socialization between groups. Artifacts alone can't transform culture, but intentionally designed artifacts can reinforce desired cultural changes.
Espoused Values: The Strategic Level of Culture
The second, more deep-seated level Schein calls espoused values. These represent the strategies, goals, philosophies, and ideologies that members of an organization endorse as appropriate. However, espoused values may or may not reflect the deeper assumptions that actually guide behaviors.
For instance, a hospital may claim its top priority is patient care, yet behaviors suggest efficiency and cost-cutting take precedence. Or an aerospace company might articulate values around innovation, but actually prioritizes short-term financial outcomes over risk-taking. To assess espoused values authentically, leaders must examine supporting behaviors and discern if actions align with stated intentions.
Some ways leaders can evaluate espoused values include analyzing:
Mission and vision statements
Strategies and objectives communicated to employees
Recruitment emphases and promoted ideals
Responses to crises and major decisions
Recognition and reward systems in place
Displayed symbols, sayings, and presented definitions of success
By assessing espoused values thoroughly, leaders gain clarity on the strategies and priorities that key stakeholders endorse and find disconnects that require addressing. This process yields a more informed picture of the intended culture, separate from the deeper underlying assumptions that drive behaviors.
Basic Underlying Assumptions: The Core of Culture
At the deepest level reside the basic underlying assumptions that determine perception, thought, feelings, and behaviors. These usually occur at an unconscious level and represent unspoken, taken-for-granted beliefs and perspectives that guide how group members view the world.
Examples include:
Relationships with authority (hierarchical vs. egalitarian)
The nature of time (linear vs. concurrent orientation)
Approaches to conflict (win-lose vs. cooperative spirit)
Rewards (material vs. personal growth emphasis)
Truth (absolute vs. relative truths)
Basic assumptions operate beneath conscious awareness and are highly resistant to change. Even during mergers or crises, these deepest beliefs typically endure. As such, directly confronting assumptions rarely transforms culture in itself. However, understanding these roots provides essential context for leaders to then influence surface and strategic levels in a targeted manner.
For a technology startup, core assumptions may emphasize autonomy, risk-taking, and a bias for launching ideas quickly. Deciphering these roots helps explain why oversight feels constraining or why failure tolerance remains high. Rather than immediately attempting to instill hierarchical process frameworks, leaders could first seek to understand and work within existing assumptions where possible. Over time, patient efforts to influence artifacts and espoused values might then reshape core assumptions in a collaborative manner.
By analyzing culture through Schein's three layers - artifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptions - leaders gain invaluable context on the visible, intended, and unconscious forces that drive organizational dynamics. With insight into all three levels, leaders can strategically shape culture in a way that respects an organization's history while also guiding productive evolution over time. The following sections apply this framework to specific industries.
Application to Industries: Healthcare
Edgar Schein's model provides a useful lens for healthcare leaders striving to enhance safety, quality, and patient outcomes through cultural change. Within many hospital systems, underlying assumptions emphasize efficiency as bureaucracy has grown over time. However, desired values center around optimal patient care experiences.
To align culture more fully with patient-centric priorities, leaders could examine misalignments. For example, artifacts like overbooked physician schedules or rushed nursing workflows belie espoused commitments to individualized care. Similarly, reward systems primarily recognizing productivity metrics may undermine relationship-building values.
By understanding assumptions driving such behaviors, leaders can design intentional counterforces. Examples include embedding nurses and physicians on integrated care teams, with shared workspaces promoting information flow and cooperation versus "siloed" structures. Leadership could also recognize and promote interdisciplinary efforts delivering compassionate care through difficult situations, showing such relationships as the true drivers of success.
Over time, intentionally shaping artifacts and values in culturally-aligned ways can help reshape core assumptions around priorities and relationships within the system. Leaders steer organizational commitment from an efficiency mindset toward one upholding patient dignity and well-being as the highest guiding principles. Schein's model provides a practical roadmap for healthcare leaders seeking deeper culture change supporting these important ideals.
Application to Industries: Higher Education
Within higher education, organizational culture's influence on experiences and outcomes holds strong relevance for leaders. Many colleges emphasize student-centered aspirations, yet face pressures toward commercially-motivated behaviors from budget stresses and competition for enrollment numbers.
Schein's model surfaces potential disconnects hindering complete commitment to educational missions. For example, admissions criteria emphasizing test scores over essay substance, or advising structures lacking personalization, undermine espoused devotion to holistic development. Additionally, reward systems highlighting research publications over teaching excellence can confuse core cultural priorities.
Practically applying Schein's insights, leaders could influence artifacts and values by cultivating faculty identity with teaching excellence. Examples include promoting “faculty fellow” positions focusing solely on innovative pedagogy or sponsoring teaching conferences where such work earns prestige alongside research. Realigning performance metrics, tenure processes, and informal recognition around student-centric success stories reorients cultural drivers cohesively.
Over the long-term, leaders may thereby help evolution away from underlying assumptions of students as “customers” and knowledge as a “product” toward perspectives of collaborative learning and growth as educational institutions' highest purposes. Schein's cultural model furnishes a framework for systematically closing gaps between intended and operationalized priorities within academia’s evolving landscape.
Conclusion
Edgar Schein's model of organizational culture as consisting of artifacts, espoused values, and basic underlying assumptions offers leaders a powerful diagnostic and change management tool. By analyzing culture on multiple levels, leaders gain a nuanced understanding of drivers both visible and unconscious that determine how work truly gets done.
With insights into potential misalignments, leaders can intentionally shape culture over time through symbolic actions, role modeling, and refined strategies coherently aligning all levels. Schein's framework supports targeted yet sympathetic influence respecting an organization's history while also guiding productive evolution. Across industries, leaders applying this model find understanding and impacting culture at its deepest roots strengthens their ability to fulfill important missions through engaged, high-performing workforces. Overall, Schein’s cultural framework equips leaders with practical means of purposefully assessing and evolving the culture to drive organizational success.
Reference
Schein, E. H. (2017). Organizational culture and leadership (5th ed.). Jossey-Bass.
Jonathan H. Westover, PhD is Chief Academic & Learning Officer (HCI Academy); Chair/Professor, Organizational Leadership (UVU); OD Consultant (Human Capital Innovations). Read Jonathan Westover's executive profile here.
Suggested Citation: Westover, J. H. (2024). Understanding Organizational Culture through Schein's Model. Human Capital Leadership Review, 13(4). doi.org/10.70175/hclreview.2020.13.4.11
