Organisational Culture: Why Change Resistance Happens

Organisational culture is often the critical underlying reason why change doesn’t happen as needed. When people continue acting in ways that contradict what is expected, they may not be rejecting the change; they may be responding to the signals, habits and incentives the system has taught them to trust for many years now. In this article, I explore how leaders can move from blaming resistance to understanding the culture that makes current behaviour feel “the right one”.

“They wanted to change… they just couldn’t.” – From Be The Change 

We might have got it wrong: What if what you call resistance it’s something different?

There is a familiar moment in many transformation processes. The leadership team has made the case for change, the strategy has been communicated, the slides are clear, the town halls have happened and the new behaviours have been named. For a few weeks there may even be energy in the system. People use the new language. Some teams try the new practices. A few early adopters show enthusiasm. Then, almost imperceptibly, the organisation begins to return to what has been the norm for years. Those behaviors we are trying to change.

From the top, this often looks like resistance. Leaders ask why people do not understand the urgency, why managers are not role-modelling the change, why teams keep behaving as if the old strategy still applied. But in many cases, what we call resistance is not a lack of intelligence, commitment or goodwill. It is a rational response to the existing norms and rituals that made people safe for a long time now. People continue doing what the system has taught them is safe, rewarded and expected.

This distinction matters enormously. If we misdiagnose the problem as individual resistance, we will design individual solutions: more communication, more training, more reminders, perhaps more pressure. If we instead understand it as a cultural response, we will need to ask a different set of questions. What is the system teaching people? What would someone risk by behaving differently? Which old behaviours continue to be rewarded? Which new behaviours are still words without evidence that will make people successful and appreciated around here?

How does organisational culture teach people what is safe?

Organisational culture teaches through repetition. It teaches through what happens in meetings, what is incentivized, who is promoted (and who is not), the stories that are being told in town halls and also in the hallway, and the consequences of our actions. Nobody needs to write down every rule. People learn quickly by watching what happens to others. They notice who is invited into important conversations, who is listened to, who is protected, who is criticised and who is rewarded.

A company may say it values risk-taking, but if people who try something new are quietly punished when the result is imperfect, the lesson is clear. A leadership team may say it wants honest conversations, but if the person who raises the uncomfortable issue is labelled negative, the system has spoken. An organisation may say customer centricity is critical, but if internal politics receives more attention than customer experience, people understand where to invest their energy.

This is why organisational culture and leadership alignment must be treated together. Culture is not a decorative layer around strategy. It is the lived set of conditions in which strategy either becomes possible or becomes another narrative people learn to survive. As explored in Axialent’s article, Culture in Service of Business Strategy, culture is what connects strategic intent with successful execution.

Why do leaders underestimate what seems intangible?

Leaders often underestimate culture because they have learned to see what is visible: structures, processes, dashboards, roles, KPIs, budgets and decisions. These elements matter, of course. But the deeper system often lives in what people do not say. It lives in the stories people tell new joiners, the assumptions nobody questions, the rituals that continue after their original purpose has disappeared and the protective habits that once helped the organisation succeed.

This is the dilemma of past success. The behaviours that brought the organisation here may have been intelligent, useful and even necessary. They may have helped the company scale, survive a crisis, enter a market, control risk or protect quality. The only issue is that success can also create attachment. It can make the current logic feel like common sense. When the future requires different behaviours, leaders may intellectually agree with the change and even promote it, while emotionally protecting the system that they know they need to change.

This is connected with Edgar Schein’s view of culture, where visible artefacts and espoused values sit on top of deeper assumptions. The executive task is not merely to define a better culture, but to discover the assumptions that are still shaping behaviour beneath the surface. Until those assumptions are visible, people may continue responding to rules that nobody remembers creating.

And the first step in this process is for leaders to understand what Culture really is. Culture it’s not invisible like water in the ocean. Culture can be a very tangible and operationalizable project like sales, marketing and finance. Leaders have the responsibility to learn how to create it.  

Read more about this in: Organizational Culture and Leadership Alignment.

How can leaders make culture visible in order to  change it?

The first leadership move is observation, not intervention. Before launching the next programme, leaders can examine the organisation as a living system and ask what people are learning from it. What behaviours become easier here? What conversations become harder? What happens when someone challenges a senior leader? What happens when a team chooses the customer over internal convenience? What happens when someone says, “I don’t know”?

These questions help shift the conversation from blame to responsibility. The purpose is not to find who is guilty. It is to understand the conditions that make current behaviour logical. In many organisations, people are not failing to change because they are lazy or resistant. They are acting in ways that have been reinforced thousands of times. Culture becomes visible when leaders can connect repeated behaviours with the signals, stories and systems that keep producing them.

A useful practice is to choose one strategic behaviour and trace the signals around it. If the desired behaviour is ownership, where is ownership rewarded and where is it blocked? If the desired behaviour is collaboration, where do incentives create competition? If the desired behaviour is speed, where do governance processes make speed irrational? This kind of work may seem less dramatic than announcing transformation, but it is far more serious.

What should leaders do when culture contradicts the plan?

When culture contradicts the change plan, leaders have to resist the temptation to communicate louder. More communication can clarify an intention, but it cannot compensate for contradictory evidence. If the organisation sees leaders asking for transparency while hiding difficult information, the contradiction will teach more than the message. If people hear that experimentation matters but only perfection is celebrated, the culture will continue to choose protection.

The work begins with a few visible acts of coherence. Leaders need to change something that people can see and interpret. That could be a different type of conversation, a different decision about promotion, a different response to failure, a new way of listening to customers or the removal of a system that punishes the very behaviour the strategy requires. People do not need leaders to be perfect. They need evidence that the declared change is beginning to cost something.

This is where change becomes credible. Not when everyone repeats the new values, but when people can point to moments where the organisation chose differently. Culture changes when the new behaviour becomes safer, more meaningful and more rewarded than the old one. Until then, what looks like resistance may simply be obedience to the culture that brought us here.

Conclusion: What is your culture teaching now?

Organisational culture is not a vague explanation for why change is difficult. It is the eco-system of messages that shapes how people act to fit in. If leaders want to reduce resistance, they must first understand what the current culture has been teaching people to protect, repeat and avoid.

The question I would leave you with is: think of the one thing you are trying to change and it’s repeatedly not working… What might be the underlying messages people are receiving that is creating this? 

I would love to read your reflections in the comments.

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