Originally found at Medium, by Karen Jaw-Madson

“Only the strong survive,” as they say. While so many factors influence the success, failure, and survival of a company, culture is significant. It should be the reason for an organization’s strength, not its vulnerability. It takes more than a list of individual characteristics. It requires a culture carefully cultivated and reflected in shared experiences, throughout the company, in its entire system.

 As written before, there’s no such thing as cherry picking adjectives for something as all-encompassing as culture, like a “safety” culture, or a “team-oriented” culture, or even a “crisis-resilient” culture. A whole culture is so much more. It includes “all things that have the power to influence behaviors, interactions, and perception…[that] determine the boundaries of what is acceptable and not acceptable,” as defined in Culture Your Culture: Innovating Experiences @ Work. Look at the patterns of what is rewarded, punished, condoned, or accepted — these are what define a company’s culture. The aim is to embody a set of interconnected key capabilities that makes a company crisis-resilient as a whole — one that rises to the occasion and recovers quickly. These are the conditions that must be in place....

Trustworthy. Strong positive relationships that come with being connected are sustained by trust. This happens when people believe they will not be exploited, as defined in the Academy of Management. Trust builds reputations, followership, comradery, assumes best intentions, and willingness to overcome the benefit of the doubt. One can’t be successful without it, for it affords the much-needed social capital to get anything and everything done.

Continue reading the original article at Medium

Read the original research in Academy of Management Review

Learn more about the AOM Scholars and explore their work:

• Gareth R. Jones, Texas A&M University
• Jennifer M. George, Texas A&M University