Security Culture vs Risk Culture: What It Is, Why It Matters, and How It Actually Works

Understanding cybersecurity culture, organizational risk culture, and their role in modern human risk management

Security culture is one of the most talked-about — and least understood — concepts in cybersecurity. It’s referenced in board decks, vendor pitches, audit findings, and awareness programs. And yet, most organizations still struggle to explain what it actually is, how it differs from risk culture, or how it shows up in real work.

This pillar exists to do something simple but overdue — to clearly define what security culture actually means in cybersecurity, and why that definition matters: name the confusion, clarify the concepts, and ground security culture in operational reality — not vibes, slogans, or training completion rates.

1. The Security Culture Confusion (And Why It’s a Problem)

Let’s start with the HR-shaped elephant in the room: when most organizations hear the word culture, they immediately think of Human Resources.

That’s not wrong — but it’s incomplete.

In organizational research, culture has a long and well-established meaning, shaped by decades of work in organizational psychology and anthropology. Edgar Schein, one of the most cited voices in this space and frequently referenced by outlets like Harvard Business Review, defines organizational culture as:

“A pattern of shared basic assumptions learned by a group as it solved its problems of external adaptation and internal integration — that has worked well enough to be considered valid, and therefore to be taught to new members as the correct way to perceive, think, and feel in relation to those problems.”

This definition matters because it reframes culture as learned behavior shaped by real-world problem solving, not values statements or employee sentiment.

Why HR Is Often Seen as the “Owner” of Culture

HR functions are naturally closest to many visible expressions of culture — hiring, onboarding, performance management, engagement, and values. Over time, this proximity has created a common assumption: culture lives in HR.

But organizational culture, as Schein and others describe it, is not owned by any single function. It emerges from:

• How work is rewarded or penalized

• How tradeoffs are made under pressure

• How conflict and risk are handled in practice

HR influences culture. It does not contain it.

Why Information Security Historically Avoided Culture

For much of its history, information security has been the dominion of technology, controls, and compliance. People were treated as variables — or risks to be mitigated — rather than as participants operating inside complex systems.

As a result, security discussions often avoided culture entirely, focusing instead on tools, controls, and technical maturity. The idea that culture might meaningfully influence security outcomes felt foreign — or uncomfortably outside the traditional remit of security teams.

And yet, many Human Risk Management professionals today actively want to work across security, risk, and HR. Whether that collaboration succeeds is, somewhat ironically, dependent on the organization’s existing culture.

So When We Say “Culture,” What Do We Mean?

When we talk about culture in the context of security and risk, we mean:

The system of shared assumptions, pressures, incentives, permissions, and silences that shape how people actually behave — especially when security competes with getting the job done.

This definition is intentionally cross-functional. It allows security, risk, HR, and leadership to engage in the conversation — without reducing culture to training, policy, or vibes.

2. Security Culture vs Risk Culture: What’s the Difference?

Understanding the difference between security culture and risk culture in cybersecurity is critical, because these terms are often used interchangeably — and that misunderstanding quietly undermines human risk management, governance, and assurance.

One of the most common gaps we see is the failure to distinguish security culture from organizational risk culture.

They are related — but not interchangeable.

Security culture lives inside organizational risk culture.

If your definition of security culture stops at day-to-day behaviors — clicks, reports, or individual actions — without connecting those behaviors upward into risk culture, power dynamics, and broader change mechanisms, you miss the forest for the trees.

Frontline behaviors don’t exist in a vacuum. They are shaped by leadership decisions, incentive structures, delivery pressure, and what the organization implicitly tolerates or rewards. When security culture is treated as something separate from risk culture, organizations end up optimizing locally while systemic risk continues to grow.

These layers are not optional. They are interwoven. Security culture, risk culture, governance, and organizational change mechanisms must work together — or none of them work particularly well.

Frontline security behaviors are shaped — and constrained — by broader signals:

• How leaders trade speed vs safety

• How exceptions are handled

• Whether escalation is welcomed or punished

• Whether risk ownership is shared or siloed

This is why security culture conversations increasingly matter to GRC teams, audit functions, executive leadership, and boards seeking assurance — not anecdotes.

You cannot sustainably improve security culture without confronting the risk culture it operates within.

3. Why Most Breaches Are Cultural Failures (Not Awareness Failures)

When teams look for the root cause of data breaches, the conversation often defaults to human risk in cybersecurity — usually framed as individual error. But serious post-incident analysis and breach root cause analysis consistently show something deeper at play.

After a breach, the same explanation often surfaces: human error. It’s a convenient shorthand — and an unhelpful one. Humans design the technology, deploy it, configure it, maintain it, and use it. In an AI-enabled future, humans are also very much in the loop: training models, correcting outputs, and teaching systems how to adapt and recover. The idea that we would be secure “if it weren’t for people” collapses under even light scrutiny — especially considering that people created the systems in the first place.

This is why we reject framing humans as the weakest link. We are not going to get away from ourselves. Instead of treating people as problems to be controlled, it’s far more productive to treat culture as an early-warning system for risk. When you look closely at post-incident reports — and know how to listen — the same cultural precursors surface again and again: misaligned incentives, unspoken pressure, normalized workarounds, decision fatigue, and silence. These patterns matter. They are not noise; they are signals.

But dig deeper, and a different pattern emerges.

In many cases:

• People knew something felt off

• People recognized the risk

• People understood the policy

What failed wasn’t awareness. It was the environment they were operating in.

Common cultural conditions behind human-driven breaches include:

• Pressure to move fast

• Incentives that reward output over safety

• Silence when raising concerns feels risky

• Workarounds that become normalized

• Fatigue from constant cognitive load

When organizations label these failures as training gaps, they miss the real issue: systems that quietly push people toward unsafe behavior. 

4. Security Culture Is Infrastructure — Not a Program

Seen through the lens of a security culture framework or operating model, this distinction becomes unavoidable.

Security culture isn’t something you roll out once a year. One of the biggest maturity hurdles for human risk programs is moving past engagement scores and training completion rates, and starting to see culture as a living system — a form of risk protection, and something you actively listen to. This shift requires grounding and a learning curve, but it’s essential. When culture is treated as a system, it becomes a way to detect precursors to risk early, rather than reacting after incidents occur. The tools to do this already exist, and when used well, they’re not only effective — they’re often surprisingly engaging and even fun to use.

Once you map it and start looking at it as a system, you’ll see that it behaves far more like infrastructure than a program.

Like roads or power grids, culture:

• Is mostly invisible when it works

• Shapes behavior by default

• Fails quietly — until it doesn’t

Over time, organizations accumulate culture debt:

• Policies drift from reality

• Exceptions pile up

• Shortcuts harden into norms

Training can inform people. But systems shape behavior.

When security culture is treated as a program, it competes for attention. When it’s treated as infrastructure, it becomes part of how work actually gets done. This distinction is where most vendors stop — and where real resilience begins.

5. What Security Culture Looks Like in Practice (Observable Security Culture Behaviors and Indicators)

Security culture isn’t abstract. It’s visible — if you know where to look.

Some of the clearest signals include:

Incident behavior

• Are issues escalated early or hidden?

• Are near-misses discussed or ignored?

Decision behavior

• Are exceptions punished or explored?

• Do teams collaborate or deflect blame?

Policy reality

• Do policies match how work actually happens?

• Are people forced into workarounds to succeed?

You do need a culture assessment or security culture survey to understand the basic shape of culture — its patterns, groups and subgroups, operating norms, and shared practices. That foundational view helps you see where differences exist and where risk may concentrate.

From there, culture becomes something you can listen to in motion. Signals from more real-time systems — response times, handoffs, escalation patterns, silence or non‑engagement, avoidance, preferences — all add texture and context. Together, these indicators reveal patterns over time that are far more meaningful than any single data point.

6. Measuring Security and Risk Culture (Without Reducing It to a Score)

Culture is not a single number — even though senior leadership is often under pressure to reduce it to one. Decades of organizational research show that culture is inherently multidimensional, expressed across ranges, patterns, and types rather than a simple good/bad scale. Established culture frameworks in organizational psychology and anthropology approach measurement by looking at dimensions (such as alignment, trust, accountability, and adaptability), distributions across groups and subcultures, and movement over time.

The goal is not to collapse complexity into a score, but to make that complexity legible enough to inform decision‑making, governance, and risk management without losing the signal in oversimplification.

Common pitfalls include:

• Treating culture as a static score

• Relying only on lagging indicators

• Confusing participation with resilience

More credible approaches look at:

• Behavioral indicators over time

• Cultural signals across teams

• Program maturity, not just completion

• The gap between intent and execution

Awareness metrics tell you what happened.Culture measurement should help you understand why — and what might happen next.

7. From Security Culture to Human Risk Management

Security culture is a foundational component of modern human risk management — and it only becomes more important as human risk management programs expand in scope, maturity, and ambition.

Security culture doesn’t exist in isolation.

It connects directly to:

• Human Risk Management

• AI-enabled threats and deepfakes

• Organizational resilience and recovery

Culture determines how people respond when conditions aren’t ideal — which is most of the time. As human risk management programs expand and mature, particularly in the context of large-scale AI transformation, getting this right becomes critical rather than optional. Mature programs move beyond awareness and engagement alone and begin to operationalize culture: from diagnostics and assessment, to deliberate, programmatic change.

At this level, culture operations evolve. Engagement is no longer generic; it is infused with signals, direction, and intent. Ceremonies increase. Traditions are created. Meaning is reinforced — not just through challenge coins (though we do love them), but through experiences that reflect how the organization actually works. Culture operations require understanding what motivates and inspires different groups, how many levels and types of gamification will resonate, how organizational values intersect with real risk tradeoffs, and how stories, symbols, or characters can be used to make risk tangible and relatable.

When approached this way, security and risk culture thinking brings these elements together as a coherent system — one that operates programmatically, adapts over time, and can be measured for effectiveness and change. Understanding security culture as a system is not the end of the journey; it is the foundation for taking human risk management to the next level.

Security Culture FAQs

What is security culture in cybersecurity?
Security culture refers to the shared behaviors, norms, and responses that shape how people actually manage security risks in day-to-day work.

Is security culture the same as awareness training?
No. Training informs people. Culture reflects how systems, incentives, and pressures shape behavior.

What’s the difference between security culture and risk culture?
Security culture focuses on frontline behavior. Risk culture reflects leadership decisions and organizational norms that shape those behaviors.

Can you measure security culture?
Yes — but not with a single score. Meaningful measurement looks at behavioral signals, patterns, and maturity over time.

Why do breaches still happen when people are trained?
Because training doesn’t override pressure, incentives, fatigue, or misaligned systems.

How does leadership influence security culture?
Leadership signals — what gets rewarded, ignored, or deprioritized — set the ceiling for security culture.

How does security culture fit into human risk management?
Culture is the connective tissue between human behavior, organizational systems, and real-world risk outcomes.

How does AI change security culture and human risk?
AI doesn’t remove humans from the equation — it amplifies their role. In an AI-enabled environment, security culture shapes how models are trained, corrected, trusted, and challenged. Strong AI security culture supports healthy human‑in‑the‑loop behaviors, critical thinking, escalation, and accountability, while weak culture allows automation bias, over‑trust, and silent failure to grow unchecked.