What is Company Culture? Types, Benefits, and Examples

Somewhere around the early 2000s, popular culture got a hold of something leadership has been talking about since the 1970s and has been embodying for decades before that: culture. More specifically, company culture. 

How people behave in an organization has always had a theme (albeit not always positive). Still, it wasn’t until leadership started to grasp the concept of setting and shaping and changing culture for the good that companies began to sit up and pay attention to what was actually happening in a workplace. 

Headlines from the 2000s right up until a few years ago were hyper-focused on creating, shaping, bending, and forming organizational and corporate culture. And then something happened. Culture became a term plastered on posters and spread across human resource documents. Still, it lost its intrinsic meaning–that greater importance that leaders picked up on somewhere around 1972. 

You couldn’t find culture on company letterhead then, and you can’t find it on a screensaver or inside of a company retreat now. And that’s because culture isn’t something to talk about during onboarding and never whisper again. It’s a living, breathing, moving part of any organization, and it begins when you do. 

What Is Company Culture?

Company culture is the collection of shared values, norms, behaviors, and everyday interactions that shape how employees work together. It influences decision-making, communication, psychological safety, and the overall work environment. A strong company culture supports employee engagement, belonging, and organizational success, while unclear or inconsistent workplace cultures create confusion, friction, and turnover.

Culture Isn’t Complicated – Let’s Get Simple 

The problem with ideas that become mainstream is that they snowball into complex entities that people avoid for fear of getting it wrong. But organizational culture is simple and has nothing to do with finding a family at work or becoming a team player. 

The first conversations with new employees, role definitions, decisions, and behaviours set the tone for what follows. The bigger your team becomes, the more these interactions multiply, and the faster unspoken norms take root. 

If you give it space to breathe, culture will take on a form of its own, and people will adapt or change it. As a leader, it’s up to you to help shape the culture that you want to create. If you are not observant enough, though, you may wind up adopting someone else’s culture, so it’s essential to notice and name the culture that you want everyone to grasp as soon as it begins to form (or as soon as you take leadership). 

But how do you do that? What does it look like to try to shape a culture or set a culture? 

Why Company Culture Matters More Than Ever

As organizations have grown more complex — distributed teams, rapid scaling, shifting markets — culture has become a determining factor in whether a company thrives or fractures. Company culture affects employee retention, well-being, performance, and the entire employee experience.

Leaders often think of culture as a long-term ideal, but employees feel it immediately. They recognize it by how decisions are made, in the way feedback is handled, and how openly people can speak in a room.

A healthy culture also directly impacts the bottom line. When employees experience trust, clarity, and open communication, they collaborate more effectively, all of which are critical to organizational success.

Get to Know Norm: The Foundation of Every Strong Culture

Norms are the things that everyone you lead knows to be true about your organization and leadership style. Things like an open-door policy, owning an individual perspective, or asking open questions are norms that everyone understands, knows, and continues to move forward by accepting and adopting them daily. 

Norms are the basis for company cultures, and they are the details that you can set and model as a leader. You can determine which norms you want people to adopt, spread the truth about those norms, and let everyone know what they can expect. 

Norms are the often-unspoken patterns that guide how employees interact. They tell people:

• What is safe to say
• How decisions are made
• Whether leaders listen
• How teammates collaborate
• What “good work” looks like

Why does it matter that you ask everyone to get to know the norms? When a whole team knows what to expect and how to operate, a sense of psychological safety is established. Team members understand how the culture will function and can rely on certain truths to be upheld within it. 

That means you will have set secure boundaries for the people around you, which sets the culture. But there’s another element to culture that’s just as important as norms. 

Valuing Values

Values only matter when they become behavior. A lot of organizations publish company values or mission statements without translating them into daily practices. When values remain theoretical, it only creates cynicism.

Something magical happens when culture, norms, and core values align: a sense of safety and security. The highly prized, elusive all-inclusive workplace consists of values, meeting culture, and standards to create an atmosphere where people can trust leadership, know their importance and purpose, and expect culture to grow as the organization does. 

You can’t put these pieces together any other way than to lead with the values that you know are right and combine that vital piece with the norms already set in place. This is where decision-making becomes more coherent, performance management becomes clearer, and employees feel a deeper sense of belonging.

So many business leaders try to create culture by forcing concepts to work, but ultimately those efforts fail because culture is born, not forced. 

It’s a leader’s role to shape and build culture from the existing environment and by listening to teams as they share and grow. Repetition, ritual, and engaging your team to create a culture that feels right and is something everyone can be proud of are how organizations grow. 

Types of Company Culture: The Four Classic Models

While real culture is nuanced, leadership research generally breaks culture into four categories:

1. Clan Culture
Collaborative, relational, and rooted in mentorship. Emphasizes teamwork, shared goals, and a strong sense of belonging.

2. Adhocracy Culture
Fast-moving, innovative, and experimental. Encourages brainstorming, creativity, adaptability, and individual initiative.

3. Market Culture
Performance-driven and competitive. Prioritizes results, strategy, and external benchmarks to guide success.

4. Hierarchy Culture
Structured, clear, predictable. Values stability, process, and defined responsibilities.

No company or organization fits perfectly into one type. But understanding these models can help leaders see what’s working and what’s missing in their culture today.

How Company Culture Impacts Employee Engagement and Retention

A strong culture affects almost every measurable part of the employee journey. As such, culture really isn’t a “nice to have,” but rather a structural advantage to every organization. 

A strong company culture shows up in how people feel throughout their day-to-day experience. When the environment aligns with the organization’s values rather than contradicting them, companies experience higher retention rates. 

Employees settle in with more confidence and stay longer because the culture feels consistent and trustworthy. Engagement rises for the same reason. A positive work environment invigorates teams, naturally strengthening the connection employees feel to their work and to one another.

The impact carries into well-being, too. Cultures that honor autonomy, personal boundaries, and genuine work-life balance tend to develop healthier teams overall. Employees don’t spend their energy bracing for unpredictable reactions or unclear expectations because they can focus on the work itself.

Performance also shifts in cultures where transparency and psychological safety are the norm. High-performing teams often share a sense of trust that enables them to ask better questions, navigate conflict more directly, and innovate without fear. 

And because culture is visible from the outside, it inevitably influences who chooses to join. Top talent gravitates toward workplaces with clear values and leadership they can rely on.

Practical Steps for How to Shape Company Culture

There’s no magic formula to create the best or ultimate culture (and no playbook or manual that will tell you what the best culture for your organization looks like–despite attempts!). But there are some steps you can take to help your organization grow in a direction that works for you as a leader and for everyone around you. 

Start right now: big, small, medium – don’t wait for more people to join you or for the right time to start to build a culture. The best time to develop your culture is immediately. How can you hold each other accountable? Build it now. 

Co‐create your norms by engaging the team and actually naming how you want to behave together. When people participate, they have more buy-in and feel proud to exhibit those actions daily.

Translate values into behaviour: values are seen in the actions. This is one of the things we see most often at Reboot: a team adopts values and assumes they are intangible, not to be acted upon, but the opposite is actually true. Ensure your leadership reflects cultural values in both action and words. 

Review & evolve as you scale. As the company grows, revisit norms and values to stay aligned. Growth can be complex, and sometimes the culture has to adapt. What once worked for a team of five may not reflect the operations of a team of twenty-five.  

Company Culture Examples: What Healthy Cultures Share

Healthy and positive company cultures look different across industries, but they often share recognizable patterns that are deeply human and that inherently allow us to feel safe and supported: 

1. Clear expectations and shared goals
2. Human-centered work environments
3. Transparent, honest communication
4. Consistent employee-feedback
5. Meaningful mentorship
6. Opportunities for professional development
7. Recognition programs and perks that reward sustainable effort (not burnout)
8. A company-wide commitment to employee well-being
9. Decisions rooted in values, not just speed

Living, Breathing Culture

Work culture isn’t something you set and forget. It has to be lived daily, both in words and in actions, so it’s not enough to put those words into a document that everyone signs, but no one acts on. Of course, it will mean more to the people you lead if they are a part of the culture document (and this is one way to ensure that everyone embodies the full scope of values and norms). 

Strong cultures are co-owned. Everyone shapes them. Everyone adds to them. Everyone benefits from them. When norms, values, ethics, and collective input come together, a workplace becomes a place where people feel a sense of belonging, responsibility, and shared purpose. And that’s the part of culture that no poster could ever capture.