Culture reflects an organisation's core values and strategic direction, which means two units built under different directions will not share one.
Why it matters when the plan changes
Alignment is discussed as a single organisational property and is usually a patchwork. A company that grew by acquisition, or one that ran regional autonomy for a decade, contains several working cultures that each function well internally, because organisational culture reflects the values and strategic direction each unit was built under, not a shared one. The cost appears only at the interfaces, which is exactly where a cross-cutting plan runs and where operating patterns, how people decide and escalate under pressure, diverge without being visible in formal design.
The tension is that misalignment is not a problem until the plan requires those units to work together, and then it is a large one. Investing in alignment where no shared work exists is expensive theatre. Discovering misalignment at the point of integration is expensive delay, and Harvard Business Review reports that only 9% of managers say they can rely on colleagues in other functions and units all the time. The judgement is which boundaries the plan will cross.
In practice
Two units merged three years ago and each continues to operate as it always did. One treats a decision as final when the meeting ends; the other treats it as final when it is documented and circulated. A shared programme now runs across them, and every joint decision is understood as settled by one side and provisional by the other.
Evidence
Organisational culture reflects an organisation's core values and strategic direction, which differ across units built under different directions.
Organizational culture, Wikipedia (2026)Commitments across units are the least reliable part of execution, which is where cultural misalignment is paid for.
Donald Sull, Rebecca Homkes and Charles Sull, Why Strategy Execution Unravels and What to Do About It, Harvard Business Review (2015)
What it cannot tell you
Cultural alignment describes shared working assumptions between units, not which assumptions are correct, nor whether either unit's approach works well internally. It cannot tell you where a plan will actually create cross-unit dependency, and treating alignment as a uniform organisational trait obscures that misalignment only costs anything at the boundaries the plan actually crosses.
Questions
Not everywhere. Organisational culture, as Wikipedia's 2026 entry describes it, reflects the shared values and strategic direction of a unit, and different units built under different directions will naturally differ. What matters is that boundaries the plan actually crosses share enough working assumptions for a decision to hold on both sides.
As decisions that are settled for one party and open for the other, timelines interpreted differently, and escalations one side treats as normal and the other as hostile. Harvard Business Review found that only 9% of managers say they can rely on colleagues in other functions and units all the time, which is the underlying gap alignment addresses.
Acquisitions, long periods of regional or divisional autonomy, and different leadership tenures. Each produces a working culture that fits its own history. None of it is dysfunction until a plan requires the units to work as one, at which point all of it is.
Explicit agreements about how decisions are made, what done means and how escalation works can be reached quickly and help immediately. The underlying habits move much more slowly, which is why the written agreement is worth having even while the habits are still diverging.
Fit is about an individual matching an organisation. Alignment is about parts of an organisation matching each other. A company can hire for fit successfully in every unit and still have units that cannot work together, because each fitted a different local culture.