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Culture happens in big and small ways in organizations. Leaders at any level can be culture builders by finding ways to link their company's "big-C" culture — its official set of values — with the "small-c" culture that plays out in daily patterns of interaction. In a study of one Fortune 100 company, managers who were attentive to both the culture of the entire organization and the more narrow culture within their span of influence saw better retention numbers and team performance.

In this inductive study, we explore the dynamics between Alpinista (a pseudonym), a company that designs and manufactures rock climbing and skiing gear, and the broader cultures within which the company is embedded. Our data pushed us toward the notion of "culture as toolkit," a perspective that focuses on culture as a set of means or resources used to solve problems. By applying this perspective, we realized that Alpinista's cultural toolkit and the cultural register of the sports (the sum of the toolkits and cultural resources available for members in the environment) influence one another. To explain these dynamics, we induce a grounded model of cultural cultivation—practices that contribute to the intermingling of organizational and societal cultures—that describes cultural infusions (when the organization imports cultural materials and translates them) and cultural seeding (when the organization exports cultural materials into the environment). We describe which actors (both inside and outside of the organization) can be involved in these processes. The model that emerges from these data provides insight into the cultural dynamics present as organizational culture and broader societal cultures interact, providing insight on issues of organizational authenticity and the paradox of similarity and uniqueness.

Many organizations rely on group work to generate creativity, but existing research lacks theory on how groups' responses to recognition for creative achievement shape their subsequent creative outcomes. Through an inductive study of bands nominated for a Best New Artist Grammy from 1980 to 1990, we develop a theory of reactions to early recognition in creative groups. Our multi-method analyses include oral histories from members of each band and quantitative data, which we use to triangulate the processes they describe. Our findings reveal that groups developed sets of emergent reactions and active adjustments to the recognition and its consequences, which we call "recognition orientations." We identify three such orientations—absorbing, insulating, and mixed—that reflect how groups interpret recognition and integrate it into their subsequent processes. Most groups struggled by absorbing recognition, which led to internalizing expectations and opening their relationships to outsiders, ultimately inhibiting creativity. Some groups began to insulate themselves from recognition by externalizing expectations and bounding relationships, allowing them to sustain creative output over time. Finally, other groups developed a mixed orientation, initially experiencing the pitfalls of elevated recognition-seeking but ultimately attempting to insulate their need for external recognition by refocusing on their creative process. These findings reveal that recognition can upend the creative process, and groups that begin absorbing recognition are, ironically, less likely to earn it again in the future. Filling a critical research gap on creative production among groups that intend to continue working together, the results distinguish the skills needed to manage recognition from those needed to generate creativity, and offer insight into how groups enact longevity.