What Is Role Culture?

Role culture is a business and management structural concept in which all individuals are assigned a specific role or roles. This applies primarily to organizations and departments that operate within the same business, company or workplace. Some consider it to be an effective means of delegating work throughout a large corporate entity.

Role culture is often used in large organizations that need to increase their levels of productivity and efficiency. Role culture attempts to reduce the amount of confusion and redundancies in the workplace by giving each worker a specific set of roles and tasks for which he is responsible. However, this rigid system of work distribution does not always work well with small companies that have very few employees, which may need them to take on a variety of different duties.

Role culture is also frequently used by corporations that have a high level of specialized workers. When workers are specialized, they are trained to do one specific type of work. By specializing workers and then separating them based on their roles, companies can maximize the use of each individual employee’s specific skills and training. This usually results in an increase in productivity for the company at the departmental level.