The governance of a quality-oriented culture - In search of congruence

counterbalance to the increased levels of regulatory pressure and “control-obesity” (Bik, 2010) runs the risk of relegating it to nothing more than a checklist of instrumentally applied culture controls. Not surprisingly, this would not solve the problem. While ignoring or dismissing culture’s capacity as an intangible anomaly is one extreme, the pendulum has swung too far these days. Recent efforts to use organizational culture as an instrument of corporate governance, risk management, internal control, and compliance, such as the proposed changes to the Dutch corporate governance code (2016), and earlier the recommendation of the Dutch Future Accountancy Profession Working Group (2014), generally seem to assume a linear relationship and an instrumental approach to managing culture to drive and control behavior in organizations. We risk instrumentalizing organizational culture and ignoring the propensity of a culture’s natural capacity for organization ecology, resilience, and deficiencies to drive its organizational governance, performance, and health which means that it loses both its appeal and its invigorating capacity. Preceded by the question of whether culture can be used as performance control in section 2, in section 3 I set out to demystify the three most important myths of behavioral and cultural governance by asking the (sometimes obvious) questions that you might expect a well-informed executive to readily be able to answer: What is culture – and what is it not? What does it do – and not do – and why? Can it be managed at all? While I applaud executives and others for embracing the increased focus on culture and behavior in corporate governance, the article concludes in section 4 with three perspectives that executives and others may wish to reflect upon as they strive for a more realistic and organization ecological approach to the governance of culture and behavior.