Cultural Molding, Shielding, and Shoring at Oilco: The Role of Culture in the Integration of Routines

We explore how organizational culture shapes an organization’s integration and enactment of an external routine that is not a cultural fit. Attending to employees’ use of culture as a repertoire of strategies of action, we found that the use of familiar cultural strategies of action shaped the routine’s artifacts and expectations even before it was performed, a process we call cultural molding. Subsequently, employees drew differently on cultural strategies of action as they performed the routine, generating patterns of workarounds or hindered performances. In response to these patterns, they undertook additional cultural work to either shield their workarounds and protect them from scrutiny, or to shore up hindered performances. We contribute to the routine dynamics literature by highlighting the effortful cultural work involved in integrating coveted routines, furthering our understanding of routines as truces and the embeddedness of routines.