Organisation theory has established that organisational culture originates in the basic assumptions of founders and senior leaders, yet the mechanism through which this transmission occurs remains underspecified. This paper identifies the transmission problem — the gap in existing culture theory between what is transmitted and how transmission occurs before explicit communication or behavioural modelling begins — and proposes a single theoretical claim to resolve it: the primary mechanism of culture transmission is the intersubjective field, a pre-discursive structure of shared meaning and affect established through embodied attunement before any explicit behavioural exchange. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s (1945/2012) phenomenology of embodied attunement, Schutz’s (1967) account of relevance structures, and Edmondson’s (1999) empirical research on psychological safety as a field property, the paper argues that culture is not transmitted primarily through the explicit channels that existing accounts describe — modelling, socialisation, communication — but through the pre-reflective quality of the field that leader identity generates in every organisational encounter. Three testable propositions are derived. The paper concludes by examining the implication for culture change theory: initiatives targeting explicit behavioural and structural variables without attending to the field-generating identity structure of leaders will produce surface compliance rather than durable cultural transformation.