Stop Blaming HR for Your Toxic Culture

A familiar scene plays out in many organisations.

Engagement scores fall. Exit interviews start sounding uncomfortably similar. Good people leave. Trust drops. Managers complain that “morale is low”.

Then somebody turns to HR and says: “We need to fix the culture.”

So HR gets busy. A values workshop is arranged. A leadership programme is commissioned. New recognition initiatives appear. An engagement action plan is launched.

Perhaps the company even rewrites its purpose statement and produces a beautifully designed set of values.

Six months later, employees are still frustrated.

Why?

HR can design many of the systems that support a healthy culture, but it can't indefinitely compensate for leaders whose behaviour undermines those systems every day.

What Is Culture?

Organisational culture can sound abstract, but employees experience it in very practical ways.

They experience it when they see who gets promoted, what happens when a senior manager behaves badly, whether people can disagree in meetings, how mistakes are handled, whose voice carries weight and whether leaders keep their promises.

Edgar Schein, one of the field's most influential thinkers, argued that leadership and culture are deeply intertwined.

Leaders shape culture through what they pay attention to, reward, tolerate, and model. Over time, repeated behaviour becomes part of the organisation’s shared assumptions about how things work around here.

That is why the official values statement tells only part of the story.

A company may say it values respect while allowing a high-performing executive to humiliate people. It may encourage employees to “speak up”, while leaders become defensive whenever somebody raises a problem. It may promise collaboration, while bonuses reward individual empire-building.

People quickly learn which message is real, and culture lives in those contradictions.

Research on ethical leadership supports this.

Mayer and colleagues found evidence of a “trickle-down” effect in which ethical leadership at senior levels influenced supervisory leadership and, through it, employee behaviour. Brown, Treviño and Harrison similarly showed that leaders act as important role models for ethical conduct. Employees watch what leaders do because leadership behaviour signals what the organisation considers acceptable.

What Can HR Really Do

None of this makes HR irrelevant to culture. On the contrary, a strong HR function provides much of the infrastructure that makes culture visible and repeatable.

HR can improve how people enter the organisation. Recruitment and selection processes can assess values, judgement, interpersonal capability, and leadership behaviour, not just technical competence.

HR can design fair and coherent reward systems. Pay, incentives and recognition tell employees what the organisation values in practice. Rewarding results while ignoring how those results were achieved creates an obvious contradiction between stated values and lived experience.

HR can also build sensible career paths and promotion processes. It can help ensure leadership roles don't go simply to the strongest technical performer or the most politically connected candidate.

It can build performance systems that encourage honest conversations and credible consequences.

It can develop managers. It can teach them how to give feedback, manage conflict, coach employees, make fair decisions and create safer environments for people to speak.

HR can also measure the organisation’s climate through surveys, focus groups, turnover data, grievances, ethics reports and exit interviews.

And it can strengthen employee voice.

Research by Elizabeth Morrison shows how valuable upward voice can be and how damaging organisational silence becomes when employees conclude that raising concerns is futile or risky.

These things matter.

Bowen and Ostroff’s work on the “strength” of HR systems is particularly useful here. They argue that HR practices can create a stronger organisational climate when they send distinctive, consistent and widely understood signals about what behaviours the organisation expects and rewards.

Good HR architecture therefore creates conditions that make a healthy culture easier to build. But architecture still needs occupants who use the building as intended.

Where HR Reaches Its Limit

Imagine a company that runs a well-designed leadership programme on listening and inclusion. The CEO regularly interrupts people, dismisses dissenting views and makes important decisions before meetings even begin.

What will employees learn? Probably more from the CEO than from the workshop.

Or imagine that HR introduces a robust performance process. Senior leaders then protect a powerful executive from consequences because that person “delivers the numbers”.

Again, the lesson is clear.

Perhaps HR launches an employee listening programme. Thousands of people complete the survey. The same complaints appear for the third year running. Leadership publishes an upbeat summary, thanks employees for their honesty and changes very little.

Eventually people stop believing that the survey matters.

That is where the idea that HR can “fix culture” becomes dangerous. It allows executives to outsource something they create every day through their own decisions and behaviour.

HR cannot make an arrogant leader curious. Neither can it force an absent executive to become visible.

It also cannot create trust after leaders repeatedly break commitments or create psychological safety while senior managers punish bad news.

No HR programme can manufacture genuine concern for people in a leader who sees employees primarily as a cost to control.

Psychological safety illustrates the point well.

Amy Edmondson’s research established the importance of a shared belief that people can take interpersonal risks, such as admitting mistakes, asking questions or raising concerns. Structures can support that environment, but employees judge whether it really exists by watching what happens when people speak.

One hostile reaction from a powerful leader can make the next person think twice before raising a difficult issue.

Trust works in much the same way.

Dirks and Ferrin’s meta-analysis of decades of research found important relationships between trust in leadership and workplace attitudes and outcomes. Trust does not grow because an organisation adds the word to its values framework. Employees build their judgement through experience: fairness, consistency, competence, honesty and follow-through.

Leaders can also destroy that trust remarkably quickly.

The Uncomfortable Role HR Still Has To Play

There is, however, a risk in saying “culture is leadership’s responsibility” too casually. Weak HR functions can use that argument to excuse their own failure.

HR has a duty to point out organisational culture failings and recommend ways to address them.

If senior leaders consistently promote destructive managers, HR should say so. If incentives drive reckless or abusive behaviour, HR should redesign them and explain the risk. If engagement data repeatedly identifies the same leadership problem, HR should resist turning the findings into a communications exercise. If an executive breaches standards that would trigger consequences for almost anybody else, HR should push for consistency.

If a board remains unaware of material people risks, a senior HR executive should ensure that those risks reach the appropriate governance forum.

This requires courage and technical competence. The HR executive who wants a seat at the table must sometimes be willing to make the table uncomfortable.

CIPD guidance places culture and behaviour firmly within the people profession’s sphere of influence. Its research on senior leadership also highlights the important role people professionals play in selecting, assessing and developing leaders.

HR therefore cannot wash its hands of culture.

It influences who gets hired, who becomes a leader, how people are rewarded, which behaviours carry consequences and whether uncomfortable evidence reaches decision-makers.

Influence, however, is different from ownership.

Senior leaders determine much of the environment in which those systems operate. Culture follows what leaders repeatedly do, and destructive leadership has real consequences.

There is one qualification worth making. Culture doesn't flow only from the top. Saying that culture “always cascades from the top” goes slightly too far.

Organisations contain subcultures. A brilliant line manager can create a healthy team inside a troubled company. Equally, a destructive manager can make employees' lives miserable despite a thoughtful CEO and sensible corporate values. Peer groups establish norms too. Long-standing organisational habits can survive leadership changes.

The CIPD makes a useful distinction between broad organisational culture and organisational climate, which is employees' more immediate experience of policies, practices, procedures, and behaviours. That climate often varies considerably across teams and business units.

So everyone participates in culture, but not everyone carries equal responsibility for it. Power matters.

A junior employee can influence the atmosphere around a meeting table. A CEO can alter reward structures, remove a destructive executive, determine what information reaches the board, change strategic priorities and signal to thousands of people which behaviours the organisation will tolerate.

The greater your organisational power, the greater your cultural responsibility.

That is why accountability eventually leads upward. If leaders want a better culture, leadership has to change. If executives want a more open culture, they need to respond better when people disagree with them.

If they want accountability, they must stop protecting high-status exceptions. To build trust, they need to keep commitments.

If they want collaboration, they should stop rewarding territorial behaviour.

If they want employees to believe the values, they must make decisions that demonstrate those values, even when it's inconvenient.

And if they want people to speak honestly, they need to become the kind of leaders who can hear an uncomfortable truth without punishing the person who delivered it.

So, until next time, may you reflect on your own role in creating the culture that exists where you work. A capable HR team can help by diagnosing the problem, building systems, coaching leaders, strengthening management capability, creating mechanisms for employees to speak up, measuring progress, and challenging inconsistency.

That is a substantial role. But what HR cannot provide is leadership on behalf of leaders.

Dion Le Roux

References

1. Bowen, D. E. & Ostroff, C. (2004). Understanding HRM–firm performance linkages: The role of the “strength” of the HRM system. Academy of Management Review, 29(2), 203–221. (DOI⁠)

2. Brown, M. E., Treviño, L. K. & Harrison, D. A. (2005). Ethical leadership: A social learning perspective for construct development and testing. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117–134. (DOI⁠)

3. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. (2025a). Organisational climate and culture. CIPD.

4. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development. (2025b). Role of HR in selecting and developing senior leaders. CIPD.

5. Dirks, K. T. & Ferrin, D. L. (2002). Trust in leadership: Meta-analytic findings and implications for research and practice. Journal of Applied Psychology, 87(4), 611–628. (PubMed⁠)

6. Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

7. Mayer, D. M., Kuenzi, M., Greenbaum, R., Bardes, M. & Salvador, R. (2009). How low does ethical leadership flow? Test of a trickle-down model. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 108(1), 1–13. (ScienceDirect⁠)

8. Morrison, E. W. (2023). Employee voice and silence: Taking stock a decade later. Annual Review of Organisational Psychology and Organisational Behaviour, 10, 79–107.

9. Schein, E. H. & Schein, P. A. (2016). Organisational Culture and Leadership (5th ed.). Wiley/Jossey-Bass.

10. Schyns, B. & Schilling, J. (2013). How bad are the effects of bad leaders? A meta-analysis of destructive leadership and its outcomes. The Leadership Quarterly, 24(1), 138–158. (ScienceDirect⁠)