Is culture enough

You walk out of the interview and you think you got the job. The skills matched, the experience matched and you felt that it would be a great place to work. When you hear that you did not get the job — you are devastated. When you enquire you are told that they did not think you would fit into the company CULTURE.

It begs the question — what is the role of culture in employment and is it simply a punching bag to employ people that are not like us? Even the original people that started investigating the link between

More companies are using psychometric profiling; personality profiling and other preference based relative scoring methods to assess if a candidate is balanced and potentially stable in a position. These are often administered quickly and the results are usually the determining factor in seeing if the candidate goes forward at all.

Researchers have for an exceedingly long time tried to prove the link between culture and performance and the interesting fact is that your national culture and labour environment has more of an impact on performance than the specific team culture. Team culture is determined by a leader — which will emerge internally or externally to the team — no matter what external culture you impose. Even organisational development experts will tell you that after you have taken care of hygiene factors and built basic values in an organisation — you are stuck with the reality that you can do very little about culture, except change the leaders.

So culture as a measure is more often than not a way to determine if you will be able to work with the boss — more so than being an objective measure of how you will improve the performance of the organisation.

This begs the question if there is any value in building employee or personality types into your hiring practice and if there is an ideal team that would produce more than a team that is not ideal.

So if you are looking for the x-factor in your next interview situation it may be interesting to go off the beaten path and ask your candidate what time they get up in the morning, how tolerant and helpful they t