When evaluating a company, many investors put much of their focus on the CEO.

But, "if you want to focus on the factors that will have the biggest impact on a company's long-term prospects, pay attention instead to its internal culture," Mark Hulbert, editor of Hulbert Financial Digest, writes on MarketWatch.

Rakesh Khurana, a professor of leadership development at Harvard Business School, tells Hulbert that "large-scale statistical studies have failed to find any direct causal link between CEOs and firm performance."

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Instead, a corporation's culture "exerts a far greater longer-term influence on the company's success," Khurana explains.

Hulbert admits that it's easier to focus on CEOs rather than the culture of a company because a corporate culture is "notoriously difficult to define, much less measure."

However, Paul Gompers of Harvard, Andrew Metrick of Yale and Joy Ishii of Stanford determined in a study that a company's governance represents a good measure of its culture, Hulbert notes.

They calculated how much a company limits shareholder rights. The trio discovered that stocks of the least restrictive companies climbed 9.3 percent more than did those of the most restrictive during a decade.

GMI Ratings measures corporate culture by a company's governance factors and the accuracy of a company's financial reporting, Hulbert says.

GMI's top 10 large-cap companies according to accounting and governance Risk, in descending order, are:

• Progressive
• Range Resources
• American Electric Power
• NA Financial
• CSX
• LinkedIn
• AFLAC
• Under Armour
• Colgate Palmolive
• Whole Foods Market

Entrepreneur magazine offers seven recommendations for small businesses to build a solid corporate culture.

1. "Hire the right people the first time.
2. "Encourage community involvement.
3. "Give employees breathers.
4. "Fun is not the enemy.
5. "Acknowledge wins.
6. "Let the passion be contagious.
7. "Trust the employees."

"Company culture doesn’t have to be all about massages, breakfast burritos and swag. Culture definitely matters, but its success is based more on how people feel about working for the company than ritzy perks," Entrepreneur notes.

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