At a corporate event you can drink as much as you want—or you can't. Much of this is determined by your manager, and not at the moment of the event itself, but long before, through shaping company culture. How does this work? Swedish researchers decided to ask managers directly: what can they actually do to influence drinking culture in their teams?

What they did

The researchers conducted in-depth interviews with 44 middle and senior managers. Participants were asked to think aloud: what opportunities do they see for reducing alcohol consumption at their level? The responses were analyzed using thematic analysis—a method that looks for recurring meanings and patterns rather than simply calculating percentages.

For interpretation, they used Ames' 1992 cultural model: it divides the alcohol environment into norms, climate, availability, and formal control. In other words, it looks at alcohol not as a personal choice for each person, but as a system with certain structures in place.

Back in the early 1990s, researcher Genevieve Ames demonstrated something important: how much and how a person drinks is determined not only by their willpower, but by their environment. She described a "cultural model" in which drinking behavior rests on four interconnected pillars—norms (what counts as "normal" drinking in your circle), climate (whether the atmosphere encourages or discourages drinking), availability (how easy it is to access and consume alcohol), and formal control (whether rules exist and whether they actually work). The point is: if you want to change your relationship with alcohol, fighting it in a vacuum is a difficult and losing battle. It's far more effective to change the environment itself: the people around you, the rituals you're used to, how accessible alcohol is. Understanding these four levers is the starting point for a conscious approach to drinking.

What they found

Managers identified four types of levers they have.

Event format. The choice of activity itself determines a lot. If the corporate event is a table with food and drinks, that's one thing. If it's a quest, concert, or hike—that's something else entirely. Add the details: limited portions, non-alcoholic options displayed alongside alcoholic ones.

Personal example and conversation. If a manager reaches for water or lemonade themselves—that's a quiet but unmistakable signal. An open conversation about drinking culture without judgment reduces pressure better than silent norms. Managers said that dialogue works where orders don't.

HR support. Clear rules about where and how much is appropriate, plus training and HR department involvement—this creates the formal framework. Without it, everything else holds up worse: even a well-intentioned manager eventually hits a wall if the organization lacks internal support.

Overall well-being context. This is the least obvious lever. Managers who focus on psychological safety, workload balance, and team climate also influence drinking habits—simply because they reduce stress. Alcohol at work often exists as a way to relieve tension, and if there's less tension, the demand for it drops too.

The bottom line

Most people think of alcohol at work as a personal choice. But the surrounding environment—who reaches for a glass first, whether there's anything besides wine, how your boss reacts—is background pressure that operates quietly and almost invisibly.

If you're an employee, this is reason to see the corporate event as a system. Not "I'm weak-willed because I drank too much at the party," but "in this environment it's harder to make a different choice."

If you're a manager—you apparently have more tools at your disposal than it seems. Not bans and lectures, but small decisions: what's on the table, how you behave yourself, what actually gets discussed in your team.

Limitations

This is qualitative research: 44 people is not statistics, it's stories. You can't say "method X reduces consumption by Y%." But you can see how managers actually think about this topic.

Participants were only managers. We didn't ask what employees think about their managers in this context. Plus, people already interested in prevention are more likely to agree to be interviewed. The study was conducted in Europe—how well the findings transfer to other corporate cultures remains an open question.

Source: International Journal of Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being, DOI