Harnessing culture for effective inter-organisation collaboration

The business media and academic journals alike are full of examples of highly touted corporate mergers that fail to live up to expectations or worse. Often topping the what-went-wrong lists is the 2000 merger of internet pioneer America Online and traditional media conglomerate Time Warner. 

The reason often cited for such dashed hopes: cultural clash, whether driven by personality, turf battles, ways of working, or mission – often rolled into one. 

Understanding organisational culture and social impact   

Organisational culture has always fascinated Tirza Gapp, a PhD graduate and MPhil in Innovation, Strategy and Organisation graduate of Cambridge Judge Business School. Her key interest lies in the sphere of social impact rather than stock-market performance, and her research has found both similarities and differences between the social and corporate worlds.  

“Long before I came into the MPhil and PhD programmes, I had an interest in how culture fits into an organisation and how it advances or impedes social innovation projects in a large organisation,” says Tirza, now an Associate at Cambridge Judge. “I didn’t at that time have an idea of culture as an academic topic.” 

That quickly changed when Tirza, a native of Bavaria in Germany, came to Cambridge Judge in 2018 for her MPhil studies. For her MPhil dissertation, Tirza worked with Jennifer Howard-Grenville, Diageo Professor in Organisation Studies at Cambridge Judge, to examine how different organisations come together for supply chain sustainability, and the key role that contract clauses can play in such efforts.

Bridging organisational gaps: the TRANSFORM initiative’s unique collaboration 

As she studied for her PhD at Cambridge Judge, Tirza’s interest in sustainability led to an introduction through Jaideep Prabhu, Professor of Marketing at Cambridge Judge, to the TRANSFORM initiative for social impact, which Jaideep had become familiar with through his work on frugal innovation in developing countries. 

TRANSFORM is an impact accelerator to support social enterprises in low-income countries that is jointly run by consumer products giant Unilever, the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and professional services firm EY – 3 very different organisations whose cultures, structures and stakeholders vary greatly. 

So how has this very successful initiative avoided the sort of culture clash that has sapped efficiency and morale in so many mergers or other collaborations among organisations? 

That was the underlying subject of Tirza’s PhD thesis at Cambridge Judge, and those findings form the basis of a recent Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) article by Tirza Gapp and Jennifer Howard-Grenville entitled ‘Bringing Organizational Cultures Together for Social Impact’. 

Research by Tirza and Jennifer, as outlined in the article, examines how organisational practices can help widely different organisations collaborate effectively in tackling complex problems such as environmental and social issues. In some ways, they say, working together for social impact is even more challenging than a corporate merger because it requires not only cultural integration but also adaptation of organisational culture to confront huge global issues.

From female health workers to malaria prevention: TRANSFORM’s impactful projects 

TRANSFORM has helped more than 18 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia since launching in 2015 through more than 130 projects. Those projects include: 

• Aspen in Côte d’Ivoire, an income-diversification programme that leverages cocoa cooperatives to distribute products through farmers
• DoctHERS in Pakistan, which upskills, equips and deploys technology-enabled front-line female health workers in rural villages
• Wild Enterprise in South Africa, a sustainability innovation company that seeks to realise green economy-based opportunities
• TrashCon in India, which recovers plastics from trash to make items such as desks used in schools 
• Drinkwell in Bangladesh, which provides safe water to underserved and overlooked communities that ‘live beyond the pipe’ 

Other TRANSFORM projects in 20 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia and Southeast Asia range from insecticide-treated mosquito nets to combat malaria, to sanitation facilities using innovative toilets that use earthworms to digest waste, to empowering rural female entrepreneurs to provide last-mile distribution of high-impact consumer goods.

Examining organisational clash and collaboration at TRANSFORM 

So how did Tirza’s research on TRANSFORM evolve? 

“I got access to archival material and then access to the group’s meetings,” she says. “I attended management team meetings once a month, usually in London, each about 3 hours long.” 

And while many people may lose concentration and energy at 3-hour meetings, “these meetings didn’t feel long because one of the things that struck me is that it’s extremely well organised because everyone on the team is incredibly well prepared because they want to make an impact,” says Tirza. 

An examination of the academic literature on organisational culture clash shows that such conflict often reflects different ways of doing things. 

“There can easily be resistance because people are attached to the way they’re used to doing business,” says Tirza. “We see this in research on culture change, for example when a new CEO comes into an organisation and tries to introduce a new cultural practice that doesn’t initially work in an organisation.” 

The result of such cultural clash can be lower productivity and failure to complete useful, innovative and creative work, in part because certain work “can slip through the cracks and simply not be done when it doesn’t fit established ways of working at an organisation”, says Tirza.

In examining how TRANSFORM avoided such problems, Tirza first focused on different ways in which the 3 comprising organisations work. 

“As a professional services firm, EY engages with specific clients in specific ways in delivering to specific targets with deadlines. Unilever has ways of linking the different parts of such a large organisation, but it also has to manage large external value chains” such as manufacturers, shippers and retailers. “The FCDO, as a public sector organisation, is responsible and has an obligation to the taxpayers and an obligation to use taxpayers’ money carefully while creating public benefit.” 

How TRANSFORM has been so successful 

Tirza and Jennifer have presented elements of the TRANSFORM research at many conferences and other events. 

“The questions I get most often are: ‘are there conflicts, and if not, how are they avoided?’ and ‘how is it so successful?’” says Tirza. “My answer to the first question is that there is very little tension, and that’s because everyone is working very hard toward the same goal. 

“A key reason to why TRANSFORM is so successful, having positively affected millions of people, is because they pay a lot of attention to the impact they are having, examining the numbers carefully to focus on what counts the most, and differentiating between different aspects of impact, including who is impacted, and how, for example, through being employed by one of the social enterprises or benefitting because a member of the same household has more disposable income. This sort of attention to the detail of impact is important in many ways in terms of motivating people – they can say: ‘We have this impact and this is where we get energy.’”

The role of culture in driving sustainable growth 

In 2022, Tirza and Jennifer co-authored a chapter, ‘Organizational culture for sustainability’, in a book published by Edward Elgar Publishing entitled ‘Handbook on the business of sustainability: the organization, implementation, and practice of sustainable growth’, a book whose editors include Paul Tracey, Professor of Innovation and Organisation and Co-Director of the Cambridge Centre for Social Innovation at Cambridge Judge. 

“In recent years, attention to sustainability has become increasingly important to business organisations in all sectors,” says a summary of the book chapter. “While public attention has frequently been focused on ESG (environmental, social and governance) investment and sustainability strategies, organisational culture – the practices and underlying beliefs governing ‘how things are done’ in an organisation – can make or break an organisation’s performance on and capacity to innovate for sustainability.” 

Culture can be leveraged by both business leaders and lower-level employees to advance a firm’s sustainability efforts, so the chapter was designed to “help organisations and individuals reflect on how their existing cultures support sustainability aspirations and on how they can manage culture actively to support needed changes”.

The human element in driving organisational culture 

The pathway between her early and later research illustrates the important interaction between scholars at Cambridge Judge – in this case Professor Jennifer Howard-Grenville and then-student Tirza Gapp. 

“The human aspects are so crucial to this type of research about organisational culture,” says Tirza. “Jennifer looked at one of my early paper drafts and said, ‘It looks like culture is floating around in this draft, but it’s people who drive culture.’” The humans-propel-culture aspect was illustrated more fully in further drafts of Tirza’s research. 

Says Jennifer: “Often people blame their organisations’ cultures for what they can – and more typically can’t – do. But when they realise culture is generated, reinforced, and can be altered and changed by what they do in their day-to-day behaviours, a lightbulb often goes off.  

“People who want to change how their organisation orients to and tackles big problems in the world often find they can leverage the strengths of their culture – like its capacity for innovation, or its orientation towards long-term commitments, for example – to begin to bring about changes. So, culture can be a tool for change, while also grounding people in what makes them feel competent and capable as an organisation. When different organisations come together and leverage their combined cultural strengths, even more can happen, as TRANSFORM taught us.”  

Adds Tirza: “As researchers, we want to positively contribute to society, the quality of how people live. We want people to be able to live happy, productive and fulfilling lives, and that’s a piece not to be neglected.”

How impact and friendly camaraderie go hand in hand  

For example, Tirza noticed that TRANSFORM meetings reflected both an intense focus on impact and were simultaneously marked by friendly camaraderie among team members of the 3 organisations. 

“Everyone on the team works toward the same goal, and that is aided by the very strong personal relationships between team members. They are all working toward the same goal, but also maintaining personal relationships, and that has stuck with me. 

“This initiative reaches people, connects people, inspires people. I see this also in my day-to-day work, where I’m inspired by what I see, for example, I see it at panel discussions I attend, where I see how a very broad audience from companies and think tanks and other organisations have conversations about how to create social impact.”