Friendship Patterns and Culture: The Control of Organizational Diversity

Organizational culture is often described as a management control device, but this view obscures the importance of informal social interactions for the emergence and modification of culture. We elicited seven cultural dimensions used by employees to predict and make sense of the behavior patterns of others in an entrepreneurial firm. Forty-seven key employees rated each other on these dimensions. Consistent with predictions, friends, relative to nonfriends, made similar attributions about fellow employees across the seven dimensions. The pattern of results remained significant even controlling for demographic and positional similarities. Further, the more people disagreed with their friends, the more they tended to be dissatisfied with their jobs. The control of organizational diversity may be as much an interpersonal initiative as it is a prerogative of management manipulation.