The Dark Side of Culture Fit

Culture fit drives efficiency but at the cost of innovation

This past May (2017), my wife and I decided to pack everything up and take the kids to Spain and neighboring countries on an open-ended adventure. We moved and took up residency. Four, six and eight, we figured it was a once-in-a-lifetime window to be able to take them to another country and culture without being super disruptive to their social and academic lives. Now November, we are still here. The kids attend an international school and they are super happy. Maybe the happiest they have ever been.

Copenhagen May 2017

But it has not been without any challenges. The uber lesson of our expatriatism , not surprising for an anthropologist, is that culture matters. Everyone in the family experiences this in different ways, the most obvious one being the language which we are all learning only slowly (none of us spoke a lick of Spanish before the trip). There are a myriad of cultural differences, some anticipated and some surprising. Fewer smiles. Frequent tailgating. Siestas and the late dinners we were at least intellectually prepared for, even though they still at times catch us off guard.

Some cultural differences are very appreciated while others we find irritating. A quick lunch is a near impossibility in Mallorca, with all the pros and cons associated with that fact.

And the subsequent lesson for all of us, not just the kids, has been to keep an open mind. Especially as the kids attend an international school, with people from around the world, we cannot be assumptive when it comes to greetings, responses to playdate requests, the meaning or intent of a great many behaviors. Each takes inquiry. Patience. But the upside of the experience has been a tremendous broadening of our kids minds.

Dali Museum July 2017

It is hard to articulate exactly, but now when our kids see something novel, they consider a range of possible explanations instead of jumping to conclusions. If something is forbidden, they interrogate the reason why. If a behavior is customary but unfamiliar, they do the same. In turn, the behavior of my kids is more flexible. They are more tolerant of ambiguity. And they are able to improvise.

Barcelona August 2017

What does this have to do with culture fit in the organization?

When an HR person interviews a candidate, they are often judging if the individual is a good cultural fit for the organization. What does that mean exactly and how do they decide?

Well, let’s put aside for the moment the significant impact that implicit bias plays in candidate selection and the complicit role of culture fit. Here is an interesting article in Forbes that delves a bit into this highly problematic issue. A lot has been written about culture fit as a PC way to discard diversity practices. Certainly an important topic but not what I want to focus on here.

Let’s say, that for the sake of argument, HR was able to somehow set aside their unconscious inherent biases and focus on the fit with the corporate culture — the way the organization goes about completing jobs to be done, the expectations about reporting and hierarch, the norms and values of the organization, its philosophy. (This assumes that the organization actually understands its own culture, a rare situation indeed).

Hiring only people with a good culture fit has two big implications.

The first is that cultural homogeneity can create great solidarity and efficiency among employees. There are significant benefits to be had here. When norms are well understood and shared, transactions are more frictionless. I don’t mean in financial transactions, but the peer-to-peer interactions that occur throughout the day in the vein of Fredrik Barth’s transactionalism. Reduced to a conversation between two individuals, understanding the cultural specifics about conversational pauses, for instance, can make a 5 minute chat much more efficient when the two actors understand all the cultural rules and norms.

The U.S. Army

And of course, common culture triggers in-group favoritism and out-group distrust as well documented by Henri Tajfel’s work on the minimum group paradigm. So employees feel more bonded. Perhaps this would reduce employee attrition?

But, it comes at a real cost too.

Cultural homogeneity reduces the chance and the ability to innovate. There are a number of reasons why. For one, deviating from the norm has a higher cost, in efficiency. People are also very sensitive to how common a cultural trait is within their environment. The more common it is, the more likely that behavior is highly adaptive. So deviating is perceived to come at great risk. The more homogenous the culture, the less chance someone will deviate, and to a smaller degree.

And given what we know about the social psychology of prejudice, they are right. The very act of being non-compliant comes with negative social sanctions in highly homogenous settings.

Michael Pardo

Beyond that, people operating day in and day out in homogenous settings may lack the tools to think of innovations. It is not because they lack some core cognitive capacity. No. It is because many, perhaps most of our cultural beliefs are so assumptive that we do not even recognize them as such. So they are not the subjects of interrogation.

Hence in my mind some of the paradox of a place like Japan — at once incredibly homogenous and yet also very innovative in certain ways. Unable to innovate in others.

The other way that homogeneity reduces innovation is simply by the lack of a diverse culture pool to draw upon. This is why diversity can breed less assumptive and more agile teams. It is analogous to a the effects of genetic diversity after a population bottleneck, as we see with cheetahs. In recent history there were only 7 cheetahs alive, radically reducing the genetic diversity in the gene pool. They are all very alike. So when faced with environmental changes, the population does not have a wide repertoire of characteristics. If all the cheetahs don’t already have the necessary qualities to survive, the entire population will go extinct. But in other populations with great genetic variance, there are always some in the population with the right characteristics to thrive as the environment shifts.

So organizations must evaluate and balance the pros and cons of cultural homogeneity. Is efficiency or innovation more important? When the environment is very stable, efficiencies and cost-side competitive advantages are important. But in a radically changing world, the ability to adapt and change is existential.

Hence the perennial tension. When times are good, typically when the markets are stable, cost-side efficiencies dominate as a driver of profitability and hence the organization faces pressure to reduce variance and adopt a more risk-averse posture. But then when the markets do suddenly change, they have lost the internal assets, the very variance that they would tap, to be able to adapt and change.

For me and my wife, we have chosen to invest now in our children’s capacity to adopt — in anticipation of an economy that is very competitive and rapidly changing. It comes at a current cost in efficiency. They are learning a second and third language which, in my mind, slows down their uptake of English. They have to make new friends and this process is slower, with cultural mis-understandings and mis-communications. Living in Spain creates a friction for our work too. Some nights we work well into the evenings to map to US time zones and we are on planes a lot more it seems.

We are betting that in a global marketplace where ambiguity is a central quality of creative enterprises, where conceptual plasticity is a key asset, our kids will be better equipped given the cultural diversity they are experiencing now. We are playing a long game, a game where experience with cultural diversity wins.