Creating a Culture of Development versus a Culture of Performance

I enjoyed reading Creating an Organizational Culture of Development to Complement a Culture of Performance. it was posted on linkedin. It addresses an important challenge facing organizations today: how to balance performance expectations with employee growth and development.

It also raised a question for me.

Can an organization have a well-defined culture of development while employees still experience low trust, limited psychological safety, or a lack of belonging?

If so, perhaps culture and lived experience are related, but not identical.

I've been exploring the idea that alongside organizational culture exists something different: the relational environment—the collective interpersonal experience created through everyday interactions between leaders, teams, and colleagues.

Culture may describe what an organization values.

The relational environment reflects what people actually experience.

Two organizations may promote identical values, yet create remarkably different day-to-day experiences for their employees. Likewise, two teams within the same organization can share the same culture while experiencing very different levels of trust, openness, and connection.

That possibility raises an interesting question for leadership.

Should we spend as much time measuring the quality of the relational environment as we do defining organizational culture?

I'd be interested in hearing how others think about the relationship between culture and the lived experience of work.