Organizational Culture Model by Edgar Schein

This article explains Edgar Schein's Model of Organizational Culture in a practical way. After reading you will understand the basics of this powerful leadership and organizational culture change tool. This article also contains a downloadable and editable Organizational Culture Model template.
What is Schein's Model of Organizational Culture?
Organizational culture is an abstract concept and therefore difficult to understand. But why do people behave differently in different organizations?

In 1980 the American management professor Edgar Schein developed a organizational culture model to make culture more visible within an organization. He also indicated what steps need to be followed to bring about cultural change.

According to Edgar Schein there are direct and indirect mechanisms within organizations. Schein's Model of Organizational Culture is directly influenced by direct mechanisms. This includes exemplary behaviour, opinions, status and appointments.

Indirect mechanisms do not influence the organizational culture directly however they are determinative. This includes the mission statement and vision of a company, formal guidelines, corporate identity, rituals and design.
Schein's Model of Organizational Culture levels
Edgar Schein divided organizational culture into three different levels:

Artefacts and symbols
Artefacts mark the surface of the organization. They are the visible elements in the organization such as logos, architecture, structure, processes and corporate clothing. These are not only visible to the employees but also visible and recognizable for external parties.
Espoused Values
This concerns standards, values and rules of conduct. How does the organization express strategies, objectives and philosophies and how are these made public? Problems could arise when the ideas of managers are not in line with the basic assumptions of the organization.
Basic underlying assumptions
The basic underlying assumptions are deeply embedded in the organizational culture and are experienced as self-evident and unconscious behaviour. Assumptions are hard to recognize from within.
Also known as the onion model
In practice, the three levels of Schein's Model of Organizational Culture are sometimes represented as an onion model as it is based on different layers. The outer layer is fairly easy to adapt and easy to change. The deeper the layer, the harder it becomes to adjust it.

Deeply embedded in the core of the onion we find ...