Your work in Human Center Design for Systems, Change Management, Process Management/Innovation, OD, Service Design, or Lean Management (Hoshin Kanri) just got easier or harder, depending on how you interpret and apply the findings from a research paper published June 30, 2017: Dynamics of organizational culture: Individual beliefs vs. social conformity, by Christos Ellinas, Neil Allan, Anders Johansson and available in full here: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0180193
Some interesting findings:
“(i) an organization may appear to be increasingly coherent in terms of its organizational culture, yet be composed of individuals with reduced levels of coherence; (ii) the components of social conformity—peer-pressure and social rank—are influential at different aggregation levels.”
” In the context of organizational hierarchy, a ‘flat’ organization outperforms a ‘vertical’ organizational structure in terms of culture coherence, benefiting related processes such as organizational learning.”
“By isolating the influence of peer-pressure and social rank, a disparity of scales, in terms of their influence, emerges, with peer-pressure having a greater impact on the macro scale (i.e. organization) while social rank has a stronger influence at the micro level (i.e. individual). As a result, future attempts focusing on the influence of social conformity to organizational behavior should follow similarly integrative approaches otherwise they risk missing the interplay of influence between the macro and micro organizational levels.”
This would help to explain why mandated strategic initiatives from top management becomes diluted, derailed, or ignored as it filters down the ranks when there is little ownership, much less reinforcement (read: influence among peers) at each level. And, conversely, “company culture” might actually come across as a mix of layered strata, from different divisions below management, through various management layers until we arrive at the C-suite.
There are great implications for this across many fields, from economics to AI, but I will focus where it is possible to take action, based on this knowledge, particularly if you are working with management or involved with strategic planning that will impact company culture.
If organizations that are hierarchical in structure are unable to make change happen because of the weakness of influence between levels of social rank, there must be ways to strengthen that influence (i.e. implementing “Catchball” from Hoshin Kanri practices), to have a flattening effect even while the enterprise structure holds.
The other implication to recognize is that grassroots efforts, i.e. changes that happen among those who consider themselves cultural equals will potentially effect change faster and more thoroughly through an organization for those who feel affiliated at that level, yet not necessarily passing the social boundaries of that group, whether above or below. Again, this is an opportunity to help the messaging or communication or change in policy or procedure over the fence that organizational stratification causes.
It’s become clearer over the years that having key stakeholders in the room matters in creating change. In HCD, Design Thinking practices, and when building Agile-based operations we think of including diverse stakeholders and cross-functional teams as being vital to success. Now we know change requires influence, or perhaps better said, assisted influence, to spread through all levels and sub-cultures within the larger organizational culture, in order to cross the natural borders that are created in hierarchical entities.
Here is where the alert change agent can exercise many techniques to find those borders, and successful cross the chasm. It just takes knowing what to look for.
Fig 1. Social interactions between individuals (green) explicitly capture social effects (e.g. peer-pressure), with each the cognitive state of each individual being captured by a belief network (purple).
JOURNAL ARTICLE REFERENCE:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0180193
