ABSTRACT
How a firm views political life—with affection, with tolerance, with aggressiveness, with caution—forms the basis for the third driver of firm political behavior: corporate political culture. Just as firms have an organization culture, so do they have a political culture. A firm’s political culture is the foundation for its political interactions. It establishes boundaries on corporate political participation, squares corporate wide norms and political opportunity seeking, places brackets around tolerance for political risk and interpretation of political uncertainty, forges a corporate value on things political, and internally rewards or punishes employee and leadership political engagement. This chapter examines the attributes of corporate political culture, differentiates among three types of political cultures, and associates firm types with likely cultural behavior.
