It’s essentially a law of human behavior: We feel most comfortable with people who are similar to us. But that similarity can lead to all kinds of dilemmas in the workplace, especially when it comes to hiring.

Award-winning sociologist Lauren Rivera is the Peter G. Peterson Chair in Corporate Ethics and a professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. Her research explores how people define and evaluate status and merit, and how those definitions shape social inequalities. Her best-selling book Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs investigates on-campus recruitment and hiring for elite professional service firms.

On the season 6 premiere, organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava sit down with Lauren to discuss how the paths to elite opportunities start at an early age and can be heavily dependent on one’s socioeconomic status. They also unpack why the term “culture fit” can actually mean social similarity in a way that often advantages white, high-class men and can reinforce gender, race, class, and disability inequalities.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

1. Don’t confuse chemistry for qualifications.  Just because you feel good talking to someone does not mean they're actually going to perform well on the job.
2. Expand what you consider to be meaningful signs of ambition or drive.  Just because someone isn't running a marathon does not necessarily mean that they're not a motivated potential employee.
3.  Structure your interviews. Ensure that  interviews are not open-ended and filled with questions like, what do you like to do in your spare time? But instead, the questions tie directly to the qualities you’re seeking for that role.

Full transcript available at: https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/posts/when-culture-fit-becomes-a-recipe-for-bias/

• Lauren Rivera | Website
• Pedigree: How Elite Students Get Elite Jobs by Lauren Rivera (Princeton Press)
• Essentializing merit: Disability and exclusion in elite private school admissions
• Physical Fit: The Role of Sports in Elite Hiring in Norway
• Not in my schoolyard: Disability discrimination in educational access
• Beyond the company line: studying workplace inequalities ethnographically
• Raj Chetty - Power of Zip Code
• Patterns of Implicit and Explicit Stereotypes III: Long-Term Change in Gender Stereotypes - Mahzarin Banaji and Tessa Charlesworth

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

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Healthcare organizations don't just have an efficiency problem—they have a culture problem. Siloed specialists, misaligned incentives, and fragmented decision-making leave patients frustrated and clinicians burned out.

Jonathan Kolstad is a professor of economic analysis and policy at UC Berkeley Haas and is one of the country's leading health economists. He’s the founder and faculty director of the Center for Healthcare Marketplace Innovation (CHMI), a joint center between Haas and UC Berkeley’s College of Computing, Data Science, and Society. CHMI’s executive director is Ted Robertson, who specializes in designing and building healthcare products with the best mix of human and AI insights in decision making.

On this episode of The Culture Kit, Jon and Ted join organizational culture expert and co-host Jenny Chatman, Dean of the Haas School, to explain why healthcare’s broken structure is ultimately a culture problem, and how AI—deployed in the right way—might help fix it.

(Note: Co-host Sameer Srivastava was out of town for this episode.)

1. Healthcare's fragmentation is baked into the incentive structure, creating professional subcultures that work against patients and each other.
2. AI has the potential to reduce burnout in healthcare providers and give patients a higher quality standard of care.
3. General-purpose AI isn't enough: healthcare needs models trained on real clinical decision-making, not medical textbooks.

Read the full transcript of this episode on our website: https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/posts/healthcare-has-a-culture-problem-can-ai-help-fix-it

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

• Center for Healthcare Marketplace Innovation
• Jonathan Kolstad - Berkeley Haas
• Jonathan Kolstad - personal website
• Ted Robertson- Berkeley Executive Education
• Ted Robertson - New leaders aim to bring AI solutions for health and climate to society”
• College of Computing, Data Science & Society - UC Berkeley
• How Berkeley Haas research fueled a company that could save Medicare patients from costly mistakes

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

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The office has never been just a place to work, it both reflects and shapes an organization’s culture. The furniture, the light, the layout, the ratio of private to shared space—all of it sends signals, whether leaders intend them to or not.

Paul Cooper and Christopher Good have spent their careers translating between what organizations say they value and what their spaces actually communicate. Paul is a principal at the architecture firm, TEF Design, and has spent 30 years designing places where people come together. Christopher is Chief Creative Officer at One Workplace, a workplace design and furnishings company, with the philosophy that no one should have to come into an office by default anymore, the office needs to earn it.

On this episode, Paul and Christopher join organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava to discuss what offices should look like now in the age of remote and hybrid models, why rents in one AI-centric San Francisco neighborhood have doubled why downtown office space sits empty, and the unknowns of designing for the future as AI takes off.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

1. One solution does not fit all spaces. Come up with some guiding principles, as a team, that align with the overall mission and vision for that space’s design.
2. Ask why your workplace exists. If it’s about people, own that, invest in it, and design for what their needs are.
3. Design for the in-between experiences. When workers aren’t at their desks or in a conference room, how does the design of the space create moments for connection?

Read the full transcript of "The Office Has to Earn It: How Physical Space Shapes Organizational Culture."

• Paul Cooper, TEF Design
• Christopher Good | LinkedIn
• Finding shared meaning through propinquity | Christopher Good | TEDxPleasanton
• Embracing the Hybrid Future: Innovative Strategies for Cultivating Workplace Culture (One Workplace)
• How to bridge the gap between workplace design and culture (Culture Amp)

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

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Culture doesn’t just shape behavior; it shapes the emotional states people value. Those values operate largely below the surface and can drive some of the most consequential decisions organizations make—who gets hired, who gets promoted, who looks like a leader, and increasingly, how we design AI.

For 30 years, psychologist Jeanne Tsai, the Dunlevie Family Professor at Stanford University and director of the Stanford Culture and Emotion Lab, has been building the science of how culture shapes emotion and its implications for decision-making, health, and how people are perceived. She joins organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava to discuss why it’s important for leaders to understand and examine this unwritten standard for how employees feel at work.

1. Name and examine your organization’s emotional ideal—and as a leader, think about how that might be at odds with your employee’s own personal emotional ideal.
2. Consider the possibility that your evaluation of a job candidate or employee might be a reflection of your emotional ideal rather than just a reflection of their merit or performance.
3. Understand that emotional misreads are often cultural misreads, and leaders should not view those differences as character judgments.

• Jeanne Tsai | Stanford University
• Stanford Culture and Emotion Lab
• Americans are obsessed with Alyssa Liu. Here’s a big reason why. (San Francisco Chronicle)
• Leader choices reflect cultural differences in ideal affect more during organizational growth than decline (Emotion)
• Should job applicants be excited or calm? The role of culture and ideal affect in employment settings (Emotion)
• Cultural variation in the smiles we trust: The effects of reputation and ideal affect on resource sharing (Emotion)
• How culture shapes what people want from AI (Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems)

Read the full transcript on The Culture Kit website.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

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We tend to treat organizational structures—such as job titles, departments, and reporting lines—like furniture: always there, moved around a bit, but rarely questioned. But what if AI is about to redesign the whole office? And in a world where you have humans and agents working alongside each other, how can leaders build a cohesive culture?

Stanford professor Melissa Valentine anticipated some of these changes in her book, Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work. In this episode of The Culture Kit, Melissa joined organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava to discuss how AI and online labor markets are enabling leaders to assemble teams, solve problems, and then disband at superhero speeds. They also explore tensions between algorithmic decision-making and human structures, the challenges of deploying AI agents alongside humans, and how to recognize the “invisible labor” that keeps everything running smoothly.

Melissa is an associate professor of management science & engineering at Stanford University and a senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

1. Hierarchy isn’t going anywhere, but departments might. While hierarchy will remain essential for accountability and coordination, departments as we know them are likely to blur and collapse as AI puts design, engineering, and product capabilities in everyone’s hands.
2. Adopt a mindset of “experts everywhere all the time.” Instead of thinking in terms of “expert scarcity,” leaders should recognize how easy it’s becoming to assemble the right talent—human or AI—for any given challenge.
3. Management is now org design. The core management loop of scoping a problem, assembling resources, and evaluating the outcome is accelerating and becoming more like a design practice. Leaders aren’t just managing people anymore; they’re architecting the structures of work teams.

Read the full transcript of "Melissa Valentine on Assembling Your ‘Avengers’: Flash Teams in the Age of AI."

• Melissa Valentine's Website
• Faculty Profile | Stanford University
• Flash Teams: Leading the Future of AI-Enhanced, On-Demand Work
• When an AI ‘Agentforce’ Enters the Workforce: Generative AI, Employment Relations, and the Changing Social Contract (Journal of Organization Design)
• Who Pays the Cancer Tax? Patients’ Narratives in a Movement to Reduce Their Invisible Work (Organization Science)
• The Algorithm and the Org Chart: How Algorithms Can Conflict with Organizational Structures — Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW)

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

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Most organizations say they want to foster creativity. But decades of research by Jack Goncalo, PhD 04, reveals they misunderstand it in fundamental ways: Leaders often implicitly reject novel ideas and penalize creative people when they’re up for leadership roles.

In our Season 5 kickoff, Goncalo unpacks the science behind why—and shares some genuinely counterintuitive findings: the conditions we think suppress creativity sometimes do the opposite. And the costs of creative work? They show up in places no one is tracking—including what your employees might eat and drink after a big brainstorm.

Goncalo joins organizational culture experts Jenny Chatman and Sameer Srivastava to discuss why the bias against creativity is worst precisely when organizations need it most, why constraints and even social rejection can actually fuel original thinking, and why asking people to be creative all day has downstream consequences leaders aren't accounting for.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

1. When building teams, look for the people who have a history of not fitting in or seeing things the way everyone else sees them.
2. Build norms, not just freedom:  provide a framework that guides people and gives them a set of expectations that make them feel comfortable sharing their creative ideas.
3. Create deliberate processes for assessing novel ideas that counteracts any evaluation bias.

• Jack Goncalo faculty bio at Gies College of Business
• The bias against creativity: Why people desire but reject creative ideas (Psychological Science)
• Creativity from constraint? How political correctness influences creativity in mixed-sex work groups (Administrative Science Quarterly)
• Outside advantage: Can social rejection fuel creative thought? (Journal of Experimental Psychology)
• Are two narcissists better than one? The link between narcissism, perceived creativity and creative performance (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin)
• Your soul spills out: The creative act feels self-disclosing (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin)
• Creativity Connects: Generating Creative Ideas on Behalf of a Brand Increases Feelings of Connection (Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin)
• Creative Ideation Activates Disinhibited Reward-Seeking and Indulgent Choices (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology)

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

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On this special episode, Sameer turns the tables on Jenny and puts her in the guest chair to talk about the new book she wrote with Stanford Professor Glenn Carroll – Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs, out April 2026.

Based on decades of research, Glenn and Jenny’s book takes on the myths, clichés, and wishful thinking about organizational culture and replaces them with what works. In this interview, they give Sameer a sneak preview of some of the top tips in the book and how leaders can start building a great organizational culture today.

Learn more about The Culture Kit and find the full transcript: https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

1. Get a spreadsheet: Be deliberate and serious about culture: treat culture like anything else in your organization that you prioritize. That means tracking!
2. Don’t start and end with announcing your values: Be consistent and comprehensive in the changes you make in an organization. Embed cultural values into every process your organization has.
3. Be aware that culture can change: Be willing to continually drive it and cultivate it into the kind of culture you’re hoping for. Be patient and don’t expect overnight success.
4. The science is easy to understand, but executing is hard. Understand the science to operate from a position of confidence.

• Making Organizational Culture Great: Moving Beyond Popular Beliefs by Jennifer Chatman and Glenn Carroll (April 2026)
• Glenn Carroll’s Stanford faculty profile
• Glenn Carroll’s personal website
• Jenny Chatman’s UC Berkeley Haas faculty profile
• Jenny Chatman’s personal website
• Parsing organizational culture: How the norm for adaptability influences the relationship between culture consensus and financial performance in high-technology firms
• Fitting In or Standing Out? The Tradeoffs of Structural and Cultural Embeddedness,
• Making Great Strategy: Arguing for Organizational Advantage
• Stop Hiring for “Cultural Fit”

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

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Should you bring your “whole self” to work? Why does authenticity matter for organizations? And what does being “authentic” even mean?

On this episode of The Culture Kit, Jenny and Sameer sit down with their colleague Erica Bailey, whose research is changing how we think about authenticity and leadership. Bailey, an assistant professor in the Management of Organizations Group at UC Berkeley Haas, talks about why she began studying authenticity, generational differences in attitudes about authenticity at work, and how we might preserve our human value in the age of AI.

Learn more about The Culture Kit and find the full transcript: https://haas.berkeley.edu/culture/culture-kit-podcast/

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

1. Focus on your own authenticity and less on convincing others: Most people’s perception of your authenticity has more to do with their own preconceived notions and less about who you really are. Spend more energy on learning about who you are, at work and in your relationships.
2. Leaders should seek to create a respectful environment:yLeaders foster authenticity in others by valuing their contributions and setting norms of genuine respect and engagement—rather than mandating people to be “authentic” with their managers.
3. Find authentic peer relationships: Authenticity is best nurtured through trusted, horizontal relationships at work. Find peers who earn and nurture your vulnerability and meet you with authenticity in return.

• Erica’s website: http://ericarbailey.com/
• “The preeminence of communality in the leadership preferences of followers,” By Rebecca Ponce de Leon and Erica Bailey, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2025: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-76072-001
• “What do workers really want in a leader?” By Erica Bailey, Haas News: https://newsroom.haas.berkeley.edu/research/what-do-workers-really-want-in-a-leader-new-study-challenges-stereotypes/
• “Positive—More than unbiased—Self-perceptions increase subjective authenticity.” By Erica Bailey and Sheena Iyengar, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2024-18545-001?doi=1

Learn more about the podcast and the Berkeley Center for Workplace Culture and Innovation at www.haas.org/culture-kit.

*The Culture Kit with Jenny & Sameer is a production of Haas School of Business and is produced by University FM.*

Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.