Developing and Maintaining a Strong Corporate Culture, While Coping With a Workforce Growing Significantly: A Qualitative Analysis on Corporate Culture Development of Fast-Growing Start-Ups

The development and maintenance of a strong corporate culture are crucial for the success of start-ups, especially during their founding and growth phases. While previous research emphasizes the founders’ role in shaping corporate culture, the growth phase of start-ups in this context has hardly been explored. This study, based on 16 semistructured interviews with founders and managers of rapidly growing start-ups, provides new insights into corporate culture development and maintenance. The qualitative study reveals that various instruments play a vital role in shaping corporate culture during the founding and growth phases. Specifically, the founders’ role model function, the definition of corporate values, recruiting, and events significantly impact this process. Additionally, the study highlights that start-ups actively and consciously strive to develop and maintain their corporate culture as the company expands in size. Given the numerous identified instruments for corporate culture development in start-ups, this work offers new insights into a relatively unexplored environment, serving as a foundation for further research. Furthermore, the practical implementation of these identified instruments is demonstrated, contributing to the practical value of this study. Keywords: cultural development; organizational culture; rapid growth; start-ups