What Is Organizational Culture? For HR professionals to have any impact on culture, they must first have a thorough understanding of what culture is in a general sense and what their organization's specific culture is. At the deepest level, an organization's culture is based on values derived from basic assumptions about the following: Human nature. Are people inherently good or bad, mutable or immutable, proactive or reactive? These basic assumptions lead to beliefs about how employees, customers and suppliers should interact and how they should be managed. The organization's relationship to its environment. How does the organization define its business and its constituencies? Appropriate emotions. Which emotions should people be encouraged to express, and which ones should be suppressed? Effectiveness. What metrics show whether the organization and its individual components are doing well? An organization will be effective only when the culture is ...