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Organizational culture is one of the strongest forces shaping what people actually do at work. It influences how employees make decisions, whether they speak up, how they respond to pressure, and what happens when formal rules leave room for judgment. My research examines culture not as a soft or symbolic feature of organizations, but as a powerful management tool that can shape behavior, strengthen commitment, and improve performance. Across this work, I show that culture matters most when it is more than a slogan from the top. It has to be shared, reinforced in daily practice, and backed by real support, resources, and consistency across the organization. In other words, culture works not when it is declared, but when it is lived.
What makes auditors more willing—and better able—to protect audit quality?
This paper shows that the answer is not simply stronger messaging about quality. Instead, better audit quality is associated with cultures that make it easier to speak up, ask hard questions, and devote the time and resources needed to act when concerns arise.
This paper examines how audit firms can cultivate auditors who are more committed to taking action when audit quality is at risk. Using interviews, an experiment, and survey evidence, we introduce the idea of action-oriented skepticism: auditors’ willingness to take the steps needed to ensure audit quality when circumstances require it. We show that these auditors are not simply more skeptical across the board. They are better calibrated. They respond more strongly when evidence points to aggressive accounting, but without creating unnecessary false alarms when it does not.
The paper then asks what kinds of culture and personal values help cultivate this kind of auditor. We find that supportive cultures matter: auditors are more action-oriented when they work in environments that encourage voice and provide the resources needed to do the job well. We also find that selection matters: auditors who care deeply about truth-seeking and societal contribution are more likely to exhibit this stronger commitment to audit quality. By contrast, simply communicating that audit quality is important can backfire if it is experienced as rhetoric rather than reality.
Culture does not shape organizations because it is declared from the top. It shapes organizations when it is consistently understood and lived across them.
In this paper, we examine whether greater consistency between the values held by top management and those embraced in local units improves satisfaction and performance, and when that consistency matters most.
This paper examines culture as a management control problem. Rather than treating culture as a symbolic feature of organizations, it asks whether organizations benefit when the values held by top management are more consistently reflected in the values perceived and practiced by employees in decentralized subunits. Using data from 235 subunits of a large service organization, the paper shows that greater HQ–subunit culture consistency is associated with higher employee satisfaction and stronger performance.
The paper also shows that the value of culture consistency depends on the broader control system. Its benefits are weaker in subunits that rely more heavily on formal controls such as performance rewards and direct supervision, suggesting that culture matters most when it plays a real coordinating and aligning role. More broadly, the findings show that culture is not just something an organization says about itself. It can be a powerful management tool when it is reinforced consistently across the organization.
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