Organizational Culture and Climate: What Leaders Need to Understand

The 2025 edition of Organizational Climate and Culture (Ehrhart, Schneider & Macey) offers a well-established yet newly updated framework for understanding how shared values (culture) and shared perceptions (climate) shape behavior in organizations.

Culture reflects deeply rooted beliefs and norms that form over time; climate captures employees’ current experiences of policies, practices, and priorities.

This conceptual distinction is essential for leaders navigating organizational change. It helps explain why well-intentioned initiatives sometimes fail—addressing visible processes (climate) without shifting the underlying system of meaning (culture), or vice versa.

A comparable line of thinking underpins John Mattone’s 5 Cultures of Culture Assessment (5CCA). While its structure is practitioner-oriented, the tool echoes academic insight by focusing on five cultural domains—Capability, Commitment, Alignment, Individual Performance, and Team Performance. It seeks to capture not only what a culture expresses but also how it influences performance and resilience.

Both the academic literature and leadership assessments like 5CCA emphasize that neither culture nor climate is static. Each is responsive to leadership behavior, system design, and lived experience over time. Together, they provide an integrated perspective—clarifying how organizations function beneath formal structures and what levers leaders can influence to support alignment, trust, and strategic execution.