Westrum typology concept
Ron Westrum (2004) proposed that organizational cultures cluster into three types based on how they handle information flow.
Ron Westrum (2004) proposed that organizational cultures cluster into three types based on how they handle information flow. **Pathological** (power-oriented): low cooperation, messengers shot, responsibility shirked, novelty crushed, failure leads to scapegoating. **Bureaucratic** (rule-oriented): modest cooperation, messengers ignored unless they bring the right form, failure leads to justice (finding who broke which rule). **Generative** (performance-oriented): high cooperation, risks shared, messengers actively trained and rewarded, novelty implemented, failure leads to inquiry. Accelerate (Forsgren/Humble/Kim) showed Westrum's typology empirically predicts software delivery performance — generative cultures produce high-performing teams independent of tooling. The standard frame for diagnosing whether an org's *culture* is the bottleneck.