Riding the Wave: The Culture Creation Process

Previous research portrays founders as culture creators, generating the visions and values that employees come to share. These studies seldom examine the diversity of employees reactions to founders, in part because data have been collected so long after the organizations creation periods that employees perspectives are difficult to reconstruct. In the present study, multiple versions of event histories were collected from a founder and a representative sample of employees at a relatively new, small organization. These event histories were systematically content analyzed, and the perspectives of the founder and subgroups of employees were compared. This approach to studying the culture creation process emphasizes the selectivity and diversity of employees reactions to events and draws attention to contextual factors, such as salience and stage in the organizational life cycle, that are not attributable to the personal characteristics, or actions of a particular founder.