HR's Role in Building and Changing Company Culture

Introduction

The Company culture is shared values, beliefs, and practices guiding employee behaviour. It is a key to long-term business success. As Bogale’s systematic review (2024) confirms, a solid culture is crucial for organizational health, and the primary responsibility of creating, setting, and changing culture resides with the Human Resources Department. 

HR’s strategic plan ensures strengthening key values like innovation, teamwork, and customer focus throughout the employee journey. Aggarwal and Agarwala (2023, cited in Rudd, 2024) emphasize the vital link between HR and culture. HR practices such as recruitment, training and development, performance reviews, and inclusion programs are essential for shaping the company’s culture.

This relationship raises a main question, Does HR have the power to simply design culture, or does culture grow naturally from employees’ shared, daily experiences? This blog explains that both sides matter. HR creates policies to shape the culture, but the existing culture controls how well those policies are actually put into action  (Aggarwal & Agarwala, 2023, cited in Rudd, 2024).

HR Control vs. Organic Emergence

HR's influence can be seen through two opposing views. The Functionalist (control) and the Interpretivist (natural emergence).

1. HR as the Culture Tool (Functionalist View)

From a functionalist perspective, culture can be managed and aligned with business goals. HR acts as the architect for this alignment. Case studies of successful companies like Google, Scripps Networks, and UPS show the power of having aligned strategic HR plans (Nineza, 2020). Their hiring looks for cultural fit, performance reviews reward desired actions, and recognition programs celebrate success. This creates cultural consistency and better business results. HR is the system that makes the culture stable and scalable.

2. Limitations: Culture as Real Life Experience (Interpretivist View)

The interpretivist view offers a necessary balance, pointing out the limits of HR's control. Culture is not just policy, it is a complex reality built on live experience and behaviour. Conceptual cases, such as the collapse of Enron, provide a strong proof, that the company's written values (what HR promoted) were completely different from the actual, aggressive behavior that managers showed. (Li, 2010). This highlights the Symbolic vs. Real gap. The best HR policy fails when managers act inconsistently. In this sense, culture can only be influenced, not fully controlled.

3. The Evolutionary View: The Need for Change

Modern business requires HR to do more than just to set a standard culture. HR must proactively drive its evolution. Studies show that organizations need to update HR practices and policies to include modern values like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI), manage hybrid work, and focus on employee well-being (Aggarwal & Agarwala, 2023; Trends Review, 2023). This requires balance. The culture must change to stay relevant while holding onto its core identity.

Critical Evaluation of Key HR Practices

Every core HR practice is a cultural lever, but each one also carries risks that must be managed.

• Recruitment and Selection are the first steps in creating or maintaining a culture. Hiring for cultural fit reduces friction but risks bias and creates an overly uniform workforce.
• Training and Development are essential for teaching employees the expected cultural norms. The weakness here is that training can be seen as just a formality if it is not immediately reinforced by daily managerial expectations.
• Performance Management is a powerful tool for cultural alignment because it links individuals’ effort to company values. It aligns rewards with measurable goals. The downside of this is that it often focuses too much on easy to measure outcomes, ignoring crucial intangible values like ethics, collaboration, or psychological safety.
• The Reward and Recognition systems are the clearest sign of what the organization truly values. When done right, they reinforce the correct behaviours. However, giving rewards that don't match the stated values (for example, rewarding a selfish employee in a team culture) quickly creates distrust among the workforce.
• Finally, Employee Voice and Participation help employees co-create the culture and ensure HR policies reflect their reality. For this to work, managers must genuinely respond to feedback. If employee input is asked for and then ignored, this severely damages trust and creates resentment.

Critical Discussion Themes for the HR Role

HR’s strategic role is defined by how well it manages a series of tensions that constantly shape culture:

• Power vs. Authenticity: This tension is between HR's power to enforce culture through rules and the need for that culture to be truly believed and lived by employees. If the culture feels fake or forced, employees will be cynical and ignore the rules.
• Symbolic vs. Real: This gap is between the stated culture (the values written in policies) and the real culture (how managers actually behave and what actions get rewarded). As seen in cases like Enron, if HR promotes integrity but the reward system celebrates dishonesty, the real culture will always win.
• Top-down vs. Bottom-up:Culture is shaped by executive decisions (top-down initiatives, like new values) and by employee interactions (bottom-up emergence, like team norms). Effective HR must align the vision from the top with the reality on the ground.
• Static vs. Dynamic: HR must balance the need for core, consistent values (the static foundation) with the need to responsibly adapt the culture to external shifts (the dynamic element), such as new social trends or technology. This means updating practices like DEI and hybrid work without losing the company's main identity.

Conclusion

HR is not the boss of culture, nor is it powerless. It is the essential strategic enabler or partner that turns ideas into actions. While HR creates the systems for cultural integration, its influence is ultimately limited by the authenticity of leaders and the real experiences of employees.
Effective culture relies on interdependence, requiring constant alignment between HR's rules, genuine leadership behaviour, and responsiveness to employee feedback. Looking ahead, HR’s role is moving past simply setting the culture. It is becoming the critical function responsible for adapting the culture, making sure the organization stays ethical and strong in a rapidly changing world.

References 

Bogale, A.T. and Debela, K.L. (2024) ‘Organizational culture: a systematic review’, Cogent Business & Management, 11(1), article 2340129. Available at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/23311975.2024.2340129 (Accessed: 5 November 2025).
Aggarwal, P. and Agarwala, T. (2023) ‘Relationship of green human resource management with environmental performance: mediating effect of green organizational culture’, Benchmarking: An International Journal, 30(7), pp. 2351-2376.
Rudd, T. (2024) ‘The Interplay Between Organizational Culture And Human Resources: A Catalyst For Success’, Journal of Organizational Culture Communications and Conflict, 28(S5), pp. 1–3. Available at: https://www.abacademies.org/articles/the-interplay-between-organizational-culture-and-human-resources-a-catalyst-for-success-17379.html (Accessed: 5 November 2025).
Li, Y. (2010) The Case Analysis of the Scandal of Enron. Available at: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/0d3f/5648977c18f7fef842227fd43e4298c2c4dc.pdf (Accessed: 9 November 2025).
Murphy, M. (2024) ‘Successful organizational culture change case studies’, Leadership IQ, 5 December. Available at: https://www.leadershipiq.com/blogs/leadershipiq/successful-organizational-culture-change-case-studies (Accessed: 5 November 2025).
Sims, R.R. and Brinkmann, J. (2003) ‘Enron ethics (or: Culture matters more than codes)’, Journal of Business Ethics, 45(3), pp. 243–256. Available at: https://frrl.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/lessonsfromtheenrondebacle_corporateculturematters.pdf (Accessed: 20 October 2025).
McLean & Company (2023) ‘Shaping and sustaining organizational culture: HR trends and strategies’. Available at: https://hr.mcleanco.com/research/ss/shape-and-sustain-organizational-culture (Accessed: 5 November 2025).
Nineza, C. D. (2020) Case Study - HR, Culture, and Business Results Success at Google, Scripps, and UPS. Available at: https://www.scribd.com/document/453296130/CASE-STUDY-HR-docx (Accessed: 5 November 2025).
AIHR (2025) ‘HR trends shaping organizational culture’, AIHR Blog. Available at: https://www.aihr.com/blog/hr-trends/ (Accessed: 5 November 2025).